


What The Moon Brings

by avoidingavoidance



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - World War II, Body Horror, Eye Trauma, Gore, M/M, Magic, Medical Morphine, Multi, Needles, extended graphic violence, supernatural horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2016-05-20
Packaged: 2018-04-29 07:12:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 40,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5119673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avoidingavoidance/pseuds/avoidingavoidance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world is not as it seems. It never really is, no matter how many times you figure it out. As far as I can tell, there's only one constant, one thing I always manage to get right no matter how many other things I fuck up on the way.</p><p>I am a soldier.</p><p>And now, I am also a monster.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Bad Moon Rising

**Author's Note:**

> i have a [tumblr](http://avoidingavoidance.tumblr.com)
> 
> i am so fucking excited to bring you guys this and i hope you like it as much as i do ahhh
> 
> special thanks: q, for trusting me FAR too much. kenji, for helping me make things so much worse than they need to be. hachi, for putting up with my near-constant screaming agony with the utmost of grace and painful headcanons. deb, for shaping ideas and for talking me into ot3 hell.
> 
> **I.**
> 
> _January 1944. Allied forces fight their way north through German-occupied Italy toward Rome, hoping to wrest control of the peninsula from Hitler in what would become the costliest Western campaign in the course of the Second World War._

I can’t remember my mother’s face.

Not the turn of her nose, not the curve of her thin lips, not even the sharp twinkle that used to dance across her now-distant eyes. Every detail of her appearance has been blown right out of my head, and those gaps have been sloppily painted over with the twisted, ghastly death masks of all the men I’ve killed.

Thankfully, God still has some scrap of mercy left for me, so sometimes I can remember perfectly the rich sound of her voice. 

When there’s blood dripping from my ears, trailing over the turn of my jaw, and when the gunfire and the mortar blasts and the screams of my brothers dull into steady ringing in the hollow wake of a nearby explosion, my mother’s voice fills my aching head and takes me far away from this cursed place.

She never knew the lyrics to a whole song, so she’d hum over the holes in her scattered memory. My sister gave up trying to supply the words, my mother never remembered them anyway. So we would sit in the kitchen, lulled to drowsiness by the burning Texas sun dripping through the windows and blazing on the faded yellow paint, and we’d listen to my mother’s soft croons and the clear roll of her tongue around her favorite lines.

When the blood drips from my ears and the world fades into humming to spare me the gasping, bubbling shrieks of my comrades begging for their own mothers, if I close my eyes and trust my life to God, I can go home for just a moment.

I fear those moments are the closest to home I’ll ever come again. 

I’m not saying that I cherish the Krauts’ artillery strikes. What the fuck kind of soldier would?

Instead, I’ll say this: I can no longer bear the long, vacant hours of night, because with the dark comes the smothering quiet. No explosions to help drown out the ceaseless whispers of the broken river men.

In the sinister midnight gloom that creeps like death into our foxholes from across enemy lines, they say, we have much, _much_ worse to fear than the Germans.

“I don’t rightly think I even saw it happen,” a river man croaks beside me one night, his hands shaking like he needs a hot meal and a stiff drink. He doesn’t care that I’m trying to ignore him, instead scooting desperately closer to me. Above us, the half moon reaches between the wispy clouds to slip thin, searching fingers of pale moonlight through the hole-ridden roof of the barn we’re ‘borrowing.’ “My buddy, he—he just—”

My own hands rattle when I pull half a block of chocolate out of my chest pocket, a gift from a kind nurse way back at the aid station. Something to keep me from breaking down at the sight of my last good friend bleeding out on the table between us. Can’t smoke at night, not unless we want to wake up to a battalion of German infantry standing in our spread-out innards, but chocolate works almost as well.

“Take it and shut up,” I huff, barely casting him a passing glance as I wave it in his tear-streaked, babbling face. He pauses, quivering fingers coming to accept my begrudging gift, and as he does, he leans even closer to me and gapes.

“… J-Jean?”

I freeze.

\--

My name is Jean Kirschtein. Private Jean Franklin Kirschtein, E Company, 142nd Infantry Regiment, 36th Division of the United States Army. I was born April 7th, 1922 in Trost, Texas. For the last few months, whatever salted earth I could dig a hole deep enough to squat in for a couple hours has been my home as my dwindling company and I fight our way north through the charred, cratered remains of Italy.

It’s barely a month into the year 1944, and we’ve already lost damn near all of the 141st and 143rd to a failed push over the River Rapido. The defeat was devastating. 

Over the course of two pitch-black nights, two thousand men were flung unprepared and unsupported across the frosty slush of that damned river, and the ones that managed to make it across without eating Kraut gunfire or drowning or both were welcomed with the business ends of a few Panzer tanks. 

My regiment was held back on reserve for that advance by some grace from God, but while our fellow men were out there being cut down like cattle, we were huddled helplessly at the command point, struggling to come to terms with the fact that we’re no more than faceless cannon fodder to our own higher-ups.

Our morale, already steadily declining, hit an all-time low those nights.

Luckily, someone far above us on the food chain yanked his head out of his ass long enough to pull back from Rapido, and we were spared the gruesome fate that befell so many of our fellow Americans.

There were only thirty-some soldiers that survived of the hundreds that forded the river into German territory, of the unarmored _thousands_ that crowded those cursed floodplains. The ghosts of the men that made it back across Allied lines in one piece fell in with us on our way to support another division a few miles south.

Thomas Wagner is one of those sodden ghosts, those hollowed-out river men. He found me in the barn purely by chance, crouched alone in my corner atop all my worldly possessions, half frozen from the harsh, wet winter raging outside. 

We’d known each other before the war. Before all this. I used to see him around town when I went shopping for my ma. Never talked to me much, but he had his own friends, and I had… well, nothing, if we’re being frank.

After Thomas came up from the river, he was near unrecognizable. He was the only guy that made it out of his entire company. Compared to the other river men, he don’t talk much. Big change from before. Kid never used to shut up when we were little. The night he’d talked to me, a day or two after he’d been dumped into our company with what few replacement soldiers were left, his voice was thick from disuse and cracking from the cold and the fear. 

I don’t mind Thom. I don’t. And I sure don’t blame him, neither, not with all I’ve seen. All I’ve lost.

It’s just… when we settle for the night and the quiet burrows deep into all of us, he cries for so much longer than I’ve ever heard a man cry, and he keeps right on crying all through the dark hours.

\--

“I-it was a bad call,” Thom shivers at me a few nights later, shuffling closer in our frigid foxhole. I stare at him out of the corner of my eye, too cold to even turn my head. He takes this as an invitation to budge in more, somehow finding the edge of my ragged blanket and tugging until I let loose enough to cover him too. He repays me, at least, by slipping one rattling arm over my stomach and tucking the edge of his own blanket under me. 

He doesn’t pull his arm back, but I’m so starved for contact that I don’t even crack a joke. I struck out pretty hard with the town girls on our last leave. Shit, didn’t get so much as a solid cuddle. How sad am I, that the closest physical intimacy I’ve found since I landed on this God-forsaken continent comes from a guy that used to pass right over me in his cool car with his cool friends?

“The officers think so too,” Thom continues quietly, interrupting my private pity party to expand on his earlier thought fragment. “I know the l-look. W-we should never have t-tried to cross the Rapido.”

Sighing heavily, I bundle the blankets closer again, trying to ignore the squish-crackle of frosty mud under my boots. I’m almost entirely sure that my damn lips are turning blue. 

“We d-didn’t know what was over there,” he whispers in my ear, his teeth starting to chatter from something a little more bone-deep than the cold. “H-how _could_ we have known?”

“I don’t have a damn clue, Wagner,” I grumble, pulling our blankets up over my nose. If I had any real sense of smell left, I imagine they’d reek, just like the rest of us. 

He shakes his head then, his shuddering breath hitching as he lays his frozen head on my shoulder and curls closer with a put-upon sniffle. 

“They ain’t like us over there, Jean,” he breathes after a while. “Some of us made it all the way across, y’know. Some of us dug into that far shore. The Krauts shot at us all damn night, fired mortars, picked us off like rabbits...” Thom pauses to swallow what little moisture his mouth can afford, almost choking on his own mute voice now. “But that wasn’t the worst of it.”

Brow furrowing, I glance down at him again, catching only the blunt tip of his nose under the edge of his helmet. 

“They ain’t like us over there,” Thom repeats cautiously. “Some of ‘em... some of ‘em ain’t human.”

Fear turns right-minded men to madness. We all know it. 

As we hoof it from the mass grave that is the muddy Rapido riverbed toward a town called Cassino, where the 34th Division are waiting for our weakened, disheartened, frostbitten reinforcement, we drag thirty-odd mad ghosts with us, and the further we go, the madder they get. Tortured souls in this haunted place, torturing us in turn with their rambling and raving. I’d hoped Thom would be of sounder mind.

“I d-don’t even know what happened,” Thom sobs, burying his face in our stiff blankets. “M-my buddy Sam, h-he dug into the mud next to me, a-and we tried—our boat was fucked, s-so we were gonna try an’ make a r-raft—stupid, _stupid_ idea. W-we—we cut b-brush half the night. Deaf from mortars flyin’ across the river, nothin’ for hours and hours but screaming and m-machine gun fire. A-and then, s-swear to God, everything went quiet all of a sudden, all at once. Deathly still. S-silent like the grave.” 

His voice fractures again, and his breath shudders out in broken white puffs, chapped lips gasping more for reason than air. I swallow nervously.

“It was dark, Jean. _S-so_ dark. No m-moon, no flares, too much smoke to see two f-feet in front of us. B-but I swear, Jean, I _swear_ —God save us, G-God—”

“Get it together,” I hiss, elbowing him sharply in his bony ribs.

“W-w-what are we _doing_ here?” he whimpers feebly, his hands coming to clutch his helmet, body tense and rocking. Breaking down, cracking just like the rest of the river men before him. Just like all of us probably will, with as bleak and terrible as the war looks from our dark little holes in the ground.

Fear is contagious amongst soldiers. A sickness of the faith, of the soul. 

We bottle it up, keep it inside, put on brave faces and pretend we’re here for glory, then for duty, then for survival. We do what we have to as we struggle through toward the end of this fucking awful war, and we take the hits that come along the way, no matter how unfair or senseless. No matter how many dear dead friends we leave behind. 

(Twenty-seven.)

No one likes the river men, because they came back so full of fear that they can’t keep it contained any more. It isn’t their fault. They were just following bad orders, and what was supposed to be a targeted push across the Rapido and forward through German-controlled Italy turned into the overnight slaughter of damn near every Texan man the US had left, and damn near every replacement soldier filling long-dead Texan boots.

Rapido was a massacre. Plain and simple.

We can’t think like that, though. We can’t let that thought in. Morale’s low enough as it is, and the end isn’t even close to in sight. We can’t let ourselves think that our brothers-in-arms died in a senseless, pointless bloodbath, because right now we’re on our way to jump right into another one, and _some part_ of us has to believe that we can win this time. 

We have to cling desperately to whatever sliver of hope we have left in us, or we’ll drown right alongside the doomed river men when the waters rise again.

Always the natural predator to our faith, fear seeps like perfume from the frosted earth stretching between us and Rome, filling the air and clouding the water and withering the food. Fear latches onto our every breath. Fear digs its roots deep into all of us, no matter how long we’ve been here. The ground is poisoned with it. 

Even so, we’re good soldiers here. We swallow it down, hold it deep in our gut, never let it out except in slumbering whines for God, for forgiveness, for salvation.

These river men, whatever they saw that night, hold more fear than anyone ever thought possible. Every hollow in their bodies is swollen with it, fit to burst like a rotting carcass, and when it finally explodes, terror will flood the ranks like a plague, consuming everyone it touches, regardless of rank or status or decoration.

We’re all infected. We’re lost, near-aimless, frozen and jaded and scared half to death. No one knows what the hell we’re doing anymore or why.

All we know is that we’re about two days out from Cassino, and once we meet up with the 34th, we’ll figure out what’s next. 

Planning further ahead than that don’t mean much to us these days.

\--

The next night, one day out from Cassino, Thomas wakes up screaming.

_“Whistler!”_ I jolt awake, my body’s on fire, I can still hear, so no artillery yet, where’s my _gun, my tags—“Whistler, Sam, **Whistler** —”_

Fuck.

I roll onto Thom quickly and slam my hands over his mouth, holding his stupid jaw shut so he doesn’t bite my fingers off, and he thrashes under me even as I whisper into his ear that _it’s okay, it’s okay, shut the fuck up._ The others in their foxholes hiss questions and curses, bristling with shot nerves. We’re all expecting Germans, and even if they weren’t already here, Thom’s racket might yet draw them out.

Waking up screaming isn’t exactly rare around here, but it doesn’t stop us from shaking bad when the buzz wears off and we’re left again with the haunted quiet. Once Thom’s stopped kicking, I take my hands off his face so he can breathe right, and it takes less than a second before his panting breaths turn into hushed, broken sobs again.

Disquiet oozes out of the foxholes around us, electric tension sparking in the silence as the other men wait for an explanation, or for a rain of artillery hellfire. I sigh to myself, watching Thom curl into a tiny ball against my chest, then quietly call, “Just Wagner. Dreamin’ about Hitler again.”

“Sew his fuckin’ mouth shut,” comes an irate whisper-shout a few yards back. 

Someone else grumbles, “If we gotta move ‘cause Wagner’s scared of the dark, I’m gonna cram both my boots up his ass.”

“Nah,” I snort back, rapping Thom’s helmet lightly with my knuckles, at which he jolts like a startled rabbit. “He’d like that. Might start sleepin’ in your foxhole instead, Reynolds.” 

“Shit, Stick,” Reynolds drawls softly, “I’ll take him for free if his pillow talk’s better’n yours, you melancholy li’l bastard.” 

The exchange eases the air slightly, earning a few wheezy chuckles from around us. Just as quickly as it’d gone, quiet comes again, albeit still tense and shot through with paranoia. I’ll be shocked if any of us manage to get back to sleep after that, not with the now-pressing threat of an ambush seeming to lurk in the shadows between the trees, chasing the echoes of Thom’s screams.

He doesn’t say anything when I peel his clinging arms from around my waist and roll off of him, flopping back down against his side to steal what body warmth his rattling bones can spare me. Still sniffling, he leans his helmet against mine, seeking payment in the form of whatever solidarity he can find under all my stiffness and sharp edges. He doesn’t talk, so I don’t either, and together we shiver in mutual silence.

Just as I’m drifting off again, Thom turns to look up at me, his sunken eyes rimmed red and shining in the pale moonlight as it breaks through the clouds.

“H-hey, Jean,” he whispers, his stare moving from my face to my ice-stiff collar. I pull out what remains of the chocolate I’ve been splitting with him, sliding half a broken-off square between my numb limps before cramming the other half between his. The quiet trickles between us for a while, thick and kind of awkward as we savor the rich, long-forgotten flavor flooding our deprived mouths, before he breathes, “Do you... ever regret anything?”

I stare at him.

Of fucking course I regret things. I spend near every spare moment regretting. I had kind of assumed every soldier does. We all talk quietly about every time we fought with our mothers, our wives, our kids, about every empty space where there could have been words, every word slung unwanted and abrasive where there should have been empty space, and we do this until our guilt crushes us to sleep or until enemy shells fragment our daily dying wishes.

There’s not much I want to say to that, so I don’t bother. I just look at the black mud squish-crackling between my filthy boots and suck on the dead-friend chocolate spreading sweet like poison over my tongue.

\--

“So,” I mutter conversationally, slowing a little to keep pace with Thom, who’s looking more and more haggard as the daylight hours pass. “What’s Whistler?”

Thom’s hollow eyes bug out. His fingers clench on his rifle, his dirty nails tinted blue from exposure, and I swear I can _hear_ his teeth grinding, even over the mute snapping of frozen branches and light snow under our boots as we press on toward Cassino. Swallowing heavily, he shakes his head a few good times, like he’s trying to rattle something loose, or shake off a nosy insect.

For a while, he doesn’t answer me. He just grits his teeth and blinks too hard, eyes still too wide, nostrils flaring agitatedly. I sigh, but let him be for now, pursing my lips as I tap my thumbs against the hard steel of my own rifle.

I kind of regret asking about it. I doubt it’s relevant to what we’re doing, but whatever this ‘Whistler’ is seems to haunt his every thought, awake or asleep. Call me curious.

We trudge onward through the sparse woods for a while longer, eyes kept sharp for movement, ears perking at every distant mortar blast, every spat of gunfire, every deeply-rumbling explosion echoing from our intended destination. A bomb fire welcoming party. The same kind of welcome we’ve gotten damn near this whole war.

I pray almost constantly that we’ll be pulled out soon. Have been for a while. I prayed fervently during Rapido, fearing the call to arms for that doomed operation more than I’ve ever feared the Devil in any form. I prayed like the damn Pope from Rapido to every hole I slept in that orders would come from the top to pull us all out, to send us somewhere warm and friendly to rest and recuperate. Now that Cassino’s almost in sight, certainly in hearing distance, all I can hope is that we cut through quick as we can and finally earn our tickets off the lines.

I can’t keep up like this. None of us can. We’re just about spent, riding forward on balls alone, and half-frozen ones at that.

Thom interrupts my wandering piety with a heavy sigh, glancing at the men around us as if afraid they might be listening in before he walks closer to me, almost pressing against my side. His voice low, he murmurs, “Th-they didn’t come get us until morning.” I blink up at him, raising an eyebrow, but he’s staring vacantly at the snowy char beneath our boots. “They c-came for the wounded after the second night, pulled us back across the river. Cease-fire for the day, you remember?” I nod, but I’m not entirely sure Thom notices.

He swallows again, then coughs, a hacking, wheezing sort of cough, like he’s got paper bags for lungs. I lean away from him, for all the good it’ll do, given that he basically sleeps on top of me. 

“M-most—” he tries to continue, quickly interrupted by another round of dry trumpeting. Once he’s alerted every Kraut between us and fucking Rome to his location, he wipes his mouth and apologizes to no one in particular. We’re all too worn down for anything beyond a few dirty looks, anyway. 

The way Thom’s going, he’s gonna end up back at the aid station before we can even start trouble at Cassino.

“Most of the GIs that made it across that night just got shot down by Germans,” Thom continues quietly, once he’s sure no one’s listening too hard. “But not everyone. A bunch of us hid in the bank, stuck in the damn mud. Once it got real quiet, eerie-like, there was this—this _whistling._ Like, from someone’s teeth. But loud as all hell, bouncin’ off the trees ‘bout ten yards back. Can’t ever forget that Goddamn sound...” He shudders, stiff fingers tightening hard around his rifle, and I can’t help but lag half a step back. Just in case. He’s in a good spot to blow my kneecap off if he twitches too hard, and that ain’t how I wanna leave the front line.

“Shit, Jean,” he rasps, tilting his head back to stare up at the overcast sky. “I must be losing my fucking mind...”

Against my better judgment, I snort. “’Cause you heard a _whistle_? Damn, Thom, it was probably just one of them Kraut banshee shells, the screamy, smoky ones. She-wolves. You know ‘em.” 

“Of _course_ I know ‘em,” Thom snarls harshly. I cringe away from him, a startled apology already frosting my lips as he shakes his head again. “’Course I fuckin’ know ‘em. Probably know ‘em till the day I die. But that whistle, that weren’t a Screaming Mimi. Bet my life, whatever it’s worth these days.”

My brow furrows, stiff with sweat and dirt and char, but I keep my mouth shut this time. No need to get Thom more riled than he already is. 

“Everyone else on the bank heard it, too,” he mutters, choking for a second on an agitated, wheezy breath. “And this one guy... he _knew_ it. Knew the sound. He spooked, started screamin’ bloody murder, over and over. ‘Whistler, Whistler,’ but no one on the other bank could hear him. Shit, me and my buddy were five feet from him, and _we_ could barely hear him. Air felt heavy as hell, and my ears were all muffled. Like I was underwater.”

I look around nervously, searching fruitlessly for eye contact with literally anyone but Thom. Every hair on my stick body is standing on end. His words fill my stomach with dread so heavy it ties my stomach in knots. More than ever, I fucking regret asking.

“Whistler’s somethin’ we don’t know shit about,” Thom says slowly, and his tone leaves me quaking in my damn boots. “Somethin’ evil.”

Those flat words come spoken in breath long since hollowed out, gutted by the powerful sort of terror that stomps all over every other regular kind of fear and leaves nothing but a trampled, bloody mess behind. The lifeless tone of a man utterly broken in combat, a man two paces away from eating his gun or feeding it to someone nearby. 

I lag another step back.

“Men drowned on that bank,” he eventually mumbles. “They shouldn’t’ve. It weren’t natural, the way they...”

His eyes distant, glassy, Thom seems like he’s a thousand miles away from his long-kept confession. He’s running far away from his words before they’ve even left his lips, chased by some demon never fully realized until my dumb ass went and wrenched his fear out into cold reality. His boots are moving, and his hands still cling to the frosty metal of his rifle, but Thom’s gone far, far away from Cassino, from Italy, probably even from Europe.

I wonder if he’s gone home now too, the same way I go home in the pressurized wake of nearby blasts. I wonder if Texas is as beautiful and golden for him as it is for me, if the warm breeze carrying him away smells like sunny wheat and Mama’s soup.

“Something took Sam, took those men,” Thom breathes, “Something that ain’t human, not by a long shot. The Whistler sounded the call, and—and _something_ in the river answered. Reached up out the water and grabbed ‘em by the necks. Held ‘em under the mud til they stopped fightin’.”

There’s a thousand rationalizations for what Thom could’ve seen. Boys took a bullet to the head, the force of the impact knocked them facefirst into the river mud, they twitch a little before they finish dying. Grenade blast could’ve done the same. Shit, even suicide sounds more likely. Men get scared they’re gonna get left behind, make the coward’s choice. 

I don’t really wanna voice any of these explanations, though. Thom’s probably churned through them all himself, anyway. Anything I can rationalize, he can rationalize better, sort of thing. Still, that’s not the only reason I keep my trap shut.

Less than wasted breath, what I’m more afraid of is that Thom’s gone through all these explanations and still came up with the Whistler’s river monsters as the most likely answer. I’m afraid that Thom’s lost whatever was left of his mind after Rapido, and that by fighting beside him, I’m entrusting my life to a madman.

There’s still one more option, even after all that’s been exhausted.

The last option is that Thom’s not crazy. He’s not bullshitting.

I’m not really keen on figuring out what kind of world that awful truth would leave me in.

\--

Ever since we crawled out of the ocean onto Italian soil, something crazy’s been filtering through the air the soldiers breathe. 

There’s something about this country.

The stories you hear from Italy, they aren’t like the stories you hear from other places. War stories, combat legends, foxhole gossip, no. No, this is something else entirely.

For example. One night, back before we left Rapido, a couple of British airmen strolled into a makeshift reserve barrack, where me and everyone else in my thinned-out company, in our starved battalion waited with cracking knuckles and sleepless, hooded stares for damning orders. None of us knew what the Brits wanted, but they didn’t waste half a breath filling us in. They just started chattering away like they owned the place, asking us when the last time any of us had a shave was, how wet our socks were. Bullshitting. Nothing out of the ordinary.

When they finally picked up that we were too dead on our feet to play with them, they started in on the war stories. Also typical, every soldier does it. Fills the unbearable silence.

They took turns telling us stories they heard from some other guy down on the lines, some poor schmuck who’s probably already dead immortalized only as ‘this lad Joel.’ (We all know Joel, or someone who stands in just as well.) The more stories those guys told, the more we realized that they really had no idea what it’s like on the ground, up close and personal.

These British pilots, they talked about seeing guys’ faces peeled off by mortar fire, charred flesh flapping in the wind like a shredded flag. They talked about airplane shrapnel the size of a jeep shearing a guy in half from eyes to balls, clean down the middle. They talked about an entire company of dumb American riflemen coming back from R&R, all with identical rashes on their dicks, each of them swearing a different name for the same betty in town that toyed with every last one of them. You know, the usual.

The stories you hear out of Italy are something else entirely, and they’re not half as funny as solidarity through crotch rot.

One guy swore up and down that one night, he saw two separate moons rise from the blackened sea. Another guy piped in, promised that he did too, and they were both red as blood, and the whole front line reeked like old blood for days after. Someone else said he only saw one moon, but it was definitely red, and it took up the whole damn sky, eating up the stars and robbing them of all light but that thought-consuming moonshine.

It’s not just the moon that’s weird in Italy.

Once you’ve set foot here, it doesn’t take long before magic creeps between your ears. Something in the water, something in the air. The longer you stay here, the longer you hide where the soil knows you don’t belong, the easier it is for the shadows to shift and curve in the form of claws and teeth and an awful, screaming, _consuming_ hunger.

The darkness here is alive. It breathes smoke.

By the time those Brit airmen had had enough of us, they were practically sprinting out of our barracks, every fearful stride chased by the vaporous ghost of our collective contagious madness as it reached out for fresh meat.

Italy is breathtakingly gorgeous, and its citizens are kind and helpful and hospitable where they can be, but the wounds this war inflicts as we crush our way toward Rome will leave behind lasting, starving scars in the churned earth. 

Those scars will undoubtedly clamor for bloodshed.

\--

I don’t ask Thom about Rapido again, nor about his Kraut Whistler. I kind of doubt he’d managed to tell anyone else, seeing as he’s been stuck so close to my side that our coats might have frozen together. 

I think this is one Italy story that might best be left in a crater somewhere. 

\--

By the time we hike up to the broken-down little village held by the remains of the US 34th Division, the last of the sun’s rays are twinkling from between the distant, snowy mountains, casting shadows long enough to soak the entire hilly river valley below us in unforgiving darkness.

Nestled at the sloped edge of a towering plateau about a mile out is an enormous, formidable fortress, a marble-white beacon shining in the dying light. From atop those walls, you could probably see halfway across the world.

“Monte Cassino,” someone behind me whispers as we drag our carcasses through the hamlet’s crumbling streets, his voice rattling either with fearful reverence or with the monumental weight of our exhaustion.

“It’s a monastery,” someone else says. “A real storybook holy place, monks and all.”

I imagine it would probably look the part if not for the fucking Great Wall of Cassino surrounding it on all sides. The blackened slopes just beneath those immense walls are alight with glittering rifle skirmishes and the smoky red puffs of tank fire, brief blooms of color in the darkness like a scattering of poppies amongst the burnt-out vegetation. 

Apparently, God’s doorstep is playing host to a crowd of German soldiers. Just what He wants, I’m sure. 

The sounds of conflict echo down the rocky, tumultuous hillside toward the shelled-out houses assigned to our slim ranks, but as night falls, the skirmishes grow fewer and farther between. Thom and I are just getting comfortable in a cramped, dingy cellar with the rest of our platoon, bellies some measure of full and sleep dragging at our sunken eyes, when the major, our company’s commanding officer, drops by after some emergency briefing with the 34th’s higher-ups. We scramble to attention as he drags his boots down the splintered cellar stairs with a hint of a sour expression still lingering at the edges of his brave, certain mask.

The kind of sour expression that seems to shout, ‘Don’t bother untying your boots just yet.’

Great.

\-- 

In the steep, craggy ridges around the German control point just beneath the monastery, an entire company from the 34th went silent much more suddenly than anyone is comfortable with. So, of course, who better to find them and relieve them than the bare-bones scraps of men left over from the last disastrous attempts to break through enemy lines? The major gives Thom a field promotion to lieutenant, citing ‘honorable conduct in the field’ as the vague reasoning, and once the night is as still and silent as the front lines can possibly be, Thom and a worn-out 34th ranger lead our platoon out of the village and into the mortar-scarred hills toward God only knows what.

The smoky night sky is dominated by a boastfully full moon. It hangs at its peak amongst the faded stars and illuminates almost violently the unyielding stone of the fortress far above us, shining too brightly on our quiet advance through the cover of whatever shadows we can find along the uneven, rocky ridges winding up the plateau’s intimidating slope.

After what feels like forever spent creeping and crawling and grinding my teeth, the shadows grow longer and darker, and the formidable monastery looms over us, the pale stone a stark contrast to the black sky. Our guide, the ranger, comes to a sudden stop in the moonshade of a particularly monolithic chunk of rock and turns to us, taking a knee to spare his stooped back further strain. We crowd around him, desperate for information, or for a stall.

“Alright, boys,” he starts, his gruff voice fogging densely between us as he gestures toward the abbey. “Krauts dug in all along the slopes around the monastery. They might be inside too, we don’t know. From up there, they have eyes on everything under the sun from here to Kingdom Come.” The deep shadow of the ranger’s helmet completely obscures his eyes, leaving only his bloody lips to remember him by. “If we take this point, we take a good chunk out of Hitler’s foothold in Italy. Our boys were trying to wear them down in a night raid, but things seem to have gotten hairy, and we lost contact. Just get them wired up again and do what you can to push the assault. We have to get in there.”

“What then, sir?” someone asks. It occurs to me only after the question has left chattering teeth that Thom’s the one who asked. I barely recognize his voice, rough from half a day of strained, fearful silence.

“We’ll get you orders from there,” the ranger replies uselessly. “The company should be dug into the next ravine there, right in the belly of the beast,” he continues, turning to point in the direction of the jagged trench carved at the feet of the deeply-rooted German army, and when my gaze follows his shaking finger, my stomach sinks out of me and into the crumbling rubble beneath me. 

Something is horribly wrong out there. I can feel it in my frozen blood.

The flickering shadows cast over the shallow ditch by the insufficient rock cover seem deeper, darker, more sinister somehow than all the rest of the shaded hills behind us, and I can feel myself choking on a helpless prayer for the ranger to be mistaken. Any trench but that. Anywhere but there. Anywhere on this God-forsaken continent but that one damned stretch of rock and dirt.

“H-have—” My voice this time, as cracked from silence as Thom’s. I clear my dry throat before I try again. “Have you heard anything since the lines dropped, sir?”

“You’ll be reestablishing contact,” he murmurs evasively, swinging his bulky radio setup off his shoulder and setting it between us. Soot-black snow crunches lightly under its awkward weight. “Get this to them, have them check back in.”

I want to ask when they lost contact. I want to ask if more relief is coming. 

I want to ask anything and everything that will let me stall for time.

_Anywhere_ but there.

No more questions pass my trembling lips, and no one else supplies any in my stead. The air puffing in white clouds from our lungs is staggered, shallow, completely revelatory of our collective hesitance.

None of us want to pass into those shadows, and not just because of the sporadic, sweeping gunfire aimed between the fractured gaps in the rock cover. Not just because that entire position is absurdly exposed to the dug-in Krauts perched on higher ground, more resembling an execution line than a trench.

The ranger looks at a few of us and nods, then crawls away from that awful place, away from whatever grotesque fate became of his fellow men.

My eyes slide closed as I pull my tags out from under my restrictive layers of coats, and I press the small metal cross dangling alongside the only proof of my identity to my lips with quaking, icy fingers.

There must be a thousand jagged ridges of all shape and size scattered along the steep, steep stony rise up to the base of the abbey walls. A thousand rocky outcroppings, a thousand sprawling shadows, _any_ of which the boys from the 34th could have dug into. They had the whole fucking valley, and they chose _that_ ditch.

Then again, I’m sure that had they dug into another ridge, the violent sense of _wrongness_ would have emanated from those shadows instead.

I don’t want to go up there.

I want to go home.

The shrieking mortar shells that pepper the devastated landscape like the timely strike of a flaming metronome aren’t close enough yet to gift me the breath of release, the hint of an escape that comes with the ringing deafness of close-by explosions. We’re not close enough to present a target. Shit, the Krauts might not even know we’re here yet.

God save me, I want to go _home._

I know I can’t ever go back, though.

Home will never again smell like baked bread and dappled sunlight. 

Even if I do make it back to Trost, to my farm, I’ll go back hollow, scarred, haunted by the shadows we tortured out of the scorched Italian earth. This strange living darkness will follow me, as will the iron reek of blood that stains the back of my tongue and clots in my throat. After the stench of corpse rot clears and I can breathe again, I’ll still smell gunpowder and death long before I smell the waves of wheat all around my family’s home.

I’ve been hiding in the shade since Texan boot first bruised soft Italian mud, and I’ve dragged my sharpened nails through the screaming earth from Sicily to Cassino.

This place lives inside me now.

I’ll never be able to smell home again without hearing the piercing shriek of those damned she-wolf bombs, without remembering Thomas’s violent crying fits, without picturing vividly the promise of damnation curled beneath the shade of those Goddamn innocuous rocks.

We never should have come here.

We should have let Italy sleep.

\--

Thom has been keeping the last cracked piece of his soul tucked safe between his ribs since he first laid eyes on the swollen river.

Whether it was real or some sort of hell-sent vision meant to test his frail spirit, everything he bore witness to that night robbed him of just about everything he had, right down to the very seeds of his faith nestled deep, deep in his good Texan heart. Buried in the mud amongst the dead and the damned, faced with the frigid river still rushing thick with spilled Allied blood, Thomas lost his mind, his will, and his hope. He was a husk from that night on, and he was balanced on a precarious ledge over the depths of madness every night he spent crying into my shoulder.

When we crawl through the shadows and roll into that shallow trench, just deep enough to offer a sheltered crawlspace, we quickly discover the lost men from the 34th, and the last strained support keeping Thom safe in God’s light cracks and dissolves into ashes. 

From the moment this profane darkness seeps into our bodies, into our blood, Thom is lost.

“Wh-what could have done this?” someone sprawled beside me whispers, his voice quaking beneath the unbearable weight of the pure, malicious _evil_ that yet lingers in the pitch cast by the treacherous moon. I’m shaking, and my jaw is clenched tight, too tight to respond, too tight to pray, too tight to even _breathe._

On my other side, Thom’s choking on his own wheezing, insufficient breaths, tightly curling in on himself with his face buried in his hands so he doesn’t have to see the carnage stretching endlessly through the ditch on either side of us. He’s whimpering, twitching, and when he rips his helmet off and casts it aside with a shrill sound of despair, the dented steel bounces off a twisted, shattered leg and lands with a nauseous _splat_ in a pile of—

I don’t want to think about it. 

Thom’s body is wracked with broken sobs, dry heaves, and worse, a sickly, diseased sort of laughter that claws its way out of his dry throat between feeble gasps for air.

I can’t move.

“What could’ve _done this_?” the voice repeats agitatedly, cracking above a whisper now, and I can’t _move,_ because the only way I want to go is back, back down the unforgiving slope, _away_ from this wretched unholy ground. 

The floor of the trench is solid, unevenly-carved rock, I can feel that much against my back, but my boots are sticking and slapping in the dark, viscous stream flooding the bottom several inches thick, flowing lazily along as if this blown-out scar in the earth were its welcoming riverbed. The cooling sludge trickles in waves around chunks of blast rubble, puddling against my side and under my back and soaking my coats, rippling beneath Thom’s knees and smearing like paint over his cheek.

For all the light it offers us most nights, the moon steals from us colors and details, fine shapes and rich shades, filling in the void with an oppressive shade of night blue. Blue, blue, everything is fucking _blue,_ but even though all color has gone from the world and the stench of the dead has overtaken all other scents possible, there is no mistaking the substance seeping calmly through the ditch, following the faint tug of gravity along the curved hillside. A few feet down, a bullet-riddled gap in the shoddy rock cover allows a fat beam of smoky moonlight to illuminate a patch of the stream as it slithers through the cracks in the rocks and puddles in the craters left by passing bullets.

Blood.

I can taste it like metal, like rust on the back of my tongue, filling my throat and flooding my lungs and settling there to haunt me for however many minutes, hours I have left to live.

My eyes wrench away from that hateful spotlight back to my other side, my body floating in shock and my breath held captive in my aching chest.

The lost company of one hundred and thirteen men lie mercilessly slaughtered in a jagged fracture hewn into the rock just beneath the towering walls of Monte Cassino.

We had expected nothing less from the moment we left the village.

We could never have expected _this._

_What could have done this_ echoes screaming through every corner of my vacant mind, flooding my thoughts and drowning out my will to move, to think, to speak, to carry forward.

An aimless, probing mortar shell shrieks just overhead, pouring dense smoke in its wake, and burrows into a ridge a ways down the slope with a monstrous blast, and even though the frantic, hushed sounds of the men around me fade into tinny ringing, no hot breath of dry summer air comes to take me away. 

I cannot leave this place. I can’t go home.

I’m trapped here with all these dead men, their sticky, icy blood soaking through the back of my coat, their sightless eyes still held wide open by absolute _terror._

In the damning light of the full moon, even in the shade of the rubble feebly shielding us, we can see the gaping, mangled slashes carving open the still chests of the corpses we were sent here to rescue.

Thom’s sobbing, his hiccuping, hitching pleas for death bubbling in the stagnant pool of American blood beneath his cheek. His searching hands claw at the filthy ground, fingers slipping and streaking through the congealing flood toward the vile moonbeam beside us, until they’re climbing up to grasp the frosted sleeve of a dead officer leaned against the other wall. Thom’s shaking him, shoving, _pleading_ with no one or God, begging for the nightmare to just fucking _end_ already. 

The corpse rocks slightly with the force of Thom’s madness before his lowered head swings heavily to the side, his helmet clanging sharply off the rock holding him up. The shift moves the man closer to the sharp edge of the black shadows concealing us, and when his body falls over and splays out in the cruel blue moonlight, I can only bear to look into the chasm in his chest for a moment before the world spins and acid burns at the back of my throat.

Their chests are _hollow._ Empty.

Something, some _thing_ hacked through one hundred and thirteen soldiers beneath the cursed, lifeless light of the heavens, and it stole from every one of them the seeds of God’s love kept safe between their ribs.

Beside me, Thom’s frantic, unintelligible babbling peaks in a cracked, primal _scream,_ the sound quickly overpowered by the incoming rocket aimed at the now-visible corpse lying perfectly illuminated. A knee-jerk reaction from the Krauts at even the slightest sign of movement in the dark.

The shell lands just outside the feeble rock shield keeping us hidden. Ten feet away. Too close, far, _far_ too close.

In the explosion, I am deaf and blind, awash in a sea of fire, and _still_ I am trapped in this hellish place. My home has abandoned me.

The force of the blast sends me flying a few yards down the trench, and Thom with me, his filthy blonde hair now streaked with dripping blood from a wide gash across his unprotected scalp. Shrapnel or shattered rock, no one can tell. I’m not even convinced that Thom felt it.

Blood pours from my ears, running from my nose down my cheeks, flooding my mouth from my bitten tongue, and all I can do is stare at the hateful moon as it placidly watches Thom’s faith fall to pieces.

The other men in our platoon struggle to find cover amongst the heartless dead, shouting in some language I’ve forgotten while their hands and their boots slip in thickening pools, knees crushing dead bones, their horror mounting and mounting as the tools of the slaughter become clear to them.

_Claws._

Whatever did this has _claws,_ massive talons that rent flesh and splintered bone and searched for a prize forcibly taken, shearing through thick layers of uniform and pliable flesh to find its reward. Jagged valleys bubbling with black clots and ooze surround the crude doors to these soldiers’ souls, feral and brutal and animalistic in every way the Devil created for beasts to challenge man’s worst nightmares, and these wounds fester on the mottled, blood-drained flesh of one hundred and thirteen men who were powerless to stop their fate.

The ringing in my ears comes in waves of purposeful mortar fire pummeling the hill around our trench, echoes of the Germans playing with their food rippling through my drowned brain, and in the low tides of madness, I can hear my fellow men _shrieking._

Thom is gone. His warmth no longer rests against my bruised side. 

I try to inhale, try to come back to life, try to carry on, and my feeble breath blows a black bubble from my torn lips. Mouth still full of blood.

The earth quakes beneath me as my fingers flex and my legs shift, as the dull, stabbing pain of aching muscles burning finally breaks through the shell-shocked fog I’d sunken far beneath. Mortar fire, spats of machine gun fire, the long-echoing thunder crash of a sniper taking potshots over the edge of our crumbling cover, everything rushes back into my bloody ears along with my stilted, hitched breath when I finally manage to fucking _inhale._

_Fuck,_ shit, we have to get _out of here._

Someone’s screaming into the radio setup the ranger left us, but the wire’s been just about obliterated by artillery, and any reply that gets through is fragmented and useless to us.

I roll onto my stomach with a pained groan, _fuck,_ feeling around for my rifle, for _any_ rifle. When I shake my head roughly to loosen up the last of the vacant humming, the chin strap on my helmet snaps by my ear. It slides off my head, rolls off my shoulder, and I turn to watch it bounce away, down the trench’s gentle slope and into the now-cavernous flood of moonlight, the gap blown wide open by the mortar that had knocked me on my ass.

An instant before a hail of machine gun fire from the slopes shreds a thousand holes through my helmet, I see the razor shrapnel buried in bloodstained steel an inch above the brim, piercing just deep enough to sever the strap.

An inch down and I’d be dead.

Blood drips down the side of my face, behind my ear, down my neck, but all I feel is the heat of it.

I crawl on my battered stomach through the sludgy, chilled blood and the smoking rubble from the Krauts’ enthusiastic shelling toward a group of fresh replacement soldiers frantically praying to what few faded stars they can see through the she-wolf smoke. I fist my hands in the stained collar of the closest one to pull myself up against the rock wall beside him. All three of them startle and scream at the sight of me, perhaps having left me for dead after I went down, but I don’t have time for this shit.

“ _Listen,_ ” I holler over the now-constant gunfire from the Germans, “ _Get back to HQ, now!”_

The kid I’m shaking babbles and sobs, his wide eyes frantic, searching, his bloody hands gripping my shoulders and fisting tight in my burned uniform. I shake him harder, trying to find human reason somewhere beneath animal fear, until a Kraut shell clears our cover by a hair and blows apart a pile of stony rubble far too close to us. 

I duck fast and hide my face behind my arm, barely feeling the stabbing pinpricks of rock splinters that erupt in every direction. One of the other replacements isn’t so lucky. 

He freezes, then slams his hands over his filthy face and _screams,_ blood pouring from between his fingers, and the third kid shrills for a medic, searching desperately for help that we might not have anymore. Not like the medic can do much; kid took a nice chunk of rock right to the eyeball. He’ll live. His eye won’t.

The kid I’m clutching looks around frantically, his heels scrabbling through slick muck now caked thick with blackened soil, calling for a medic too, but I need him to fucking focus on what I’m shouting in his face. 

Three times I order his baby ass to get back to command headquarters for help, and three times he doesn’t seem to hear me at all, so I lose my patience.

I punch him right in the face.

I barely feel the impact against my scarred knuckles.

_“Shit, Kirsch—”_

_“Shut up!”_ I scream over him, rattling him again. His eyes focus now, though, even through the wails echoing all up and down the trench, through the chaos and the tossing ground beneath us. “Get back to HQ,” I repeat firmly, holding his lamb’s gaze to make sure he’s listening. “Go find the major, and get us some fucking help. Can you do that?”

The kid’s busted lip quivers, but he nods rapidly, so I kick him in the right direction, along with the other two lambs he’d been praying with, punctured eyeball or not.

I watch just long enough to make sure they make it into the long shadows back the way we came, then take a deep breath and trust my life to God before I crawl further up the gentle, sticky slope toward the rest of the men. I wrench a rifle from the clenched fingers of a dead soldier on my way, digging into his pockets for anything else he might have for me before I slither over him.

I find Thom pinned against the rock wall by a group of our men trying to beat some damn sense into him. They must have dragged him further up, away from the more exposed end of the trench. How dead did I look that they just left me there?

_“Lieutenant,_ ” Reynolds roars, slapping his rough palm against Thom’s bloody cheek, then again. _“Wagner,_ get it together!”

Thom just screams to the heavens.

Crawling up to the group, I wedge myself between two crouched men and lean up onto my knees, slinging my gun over my shoulder so I can grab Thom’s face in both hands and try to force him to look at me.

“He’s lost it,” Reynolds shouts to me, putting his heavy hand on my unprotected head and pushing me down, further away from the edge of the trench. “Ain’t said two straight words since we pulled his dumb ass out of the line of fire.”

“Thom!” I shake his head, nearly ripping the damn thing right off his shoulders. “Thom, don’t fucking lose it here,” I beg, my throat straining to overpower the gunfire. Another shell clears the ridge, and the ringing in my ears shrills in its wake. I duck my head under the rain of dirt and rock, yanking Thom’s head down too, if only so he doesn’t get a shitload of dirt in his stupid gaping mouth.

“Stick—”

“I ain’t leavin’ him,” I snarl back at Reynolds, rage flaring in my chest.

“I ain’t either,” he shouts. “But we’re gonna have to carry his ass off the lines if he can’t get it together.” A smoking she-wolf wails over our heads, drowning out the shouting of the other men, and as dirt rains on us again, Reynolds yells in my ear, “Fuck, man, get yourself a fuckin’ helmet before you ain’t got nothing to put it on!”

Growling in frustration, I turn back to Thom and slam him back against the blood-splattered rock, trying and failing to attract his bugged-out stare. The reflection of the cruel moon glistens in his bloody eyes, covering his blown-out pupils, even as his eyes flick frantically across its deathly silver surface where it fills the sky.

_“Thom!”_

“W-w-we’re too late,” Thom sputters around a thick mouthful of blood. I can fucking _see_ where he bit his tongue, mangled flesh slurring his already insane speech, and the sight ties my stomach into even tighter knots than it already was.

I can’t take much more of this shit.

Thom repeats himself, again and again, blood oozing down his chin as the moon drives him further and further out of his fucking mind, so I turn to Reynolds and shout, “We have to pull back!”

_“It’s too late!”_ Thom shrieks, his voice quaking violently, and he sits up and fists his hands in my collar to haul me close, and when he finally rips his eyes away from the moon and meets my wide stare, I wish to Christ he’d never found me in that blown-out church.

I wish he’d never come back from the haunted Rapido mud.

When I stare into Thom’s unblinking eyes, I find myself staring into the endless void.

There is nothing left of him.

I wonder if he prayed for his soul before it shattered into a thousand broken pieces here on the slopes beneath God’s desecrated monastery.

“It’s coming, Jean,” Thom’s mouth says, words formed purely by primal fear. “It’s coming, it’s coming, it’s—”

_“What’s_ coming?” Reynolds shouts, pushing down on my head again.

I know.

I know what’s coming.

I feel the world sink and twist beneath my battered knees, my reality bending and folding itself into impossible shapes in a desperate attempt to escape what’s coming.

My throat closes.

Before Thom can answer, the Germans stop firing on us. The machine guns, the sniper, the artillery, the spats of rifle fire. All of it.

My ears throb in the unnatural silence that falls over the battlefield.

Oh, Christ.

Seconds tick by like centuries. Each breath I take floods my lungs and drowns my senses, and Thom’s feral eyes bore into my skull, the inescapable, hateful moon burrowing into my head, into my bones, and oh God, oh God, I’m going to die.

All of us are.

Blood drips from the turn of my jaw.

The eerie silence crushes the breath from all of us, sewing shut our lips and robbing us of our screams, and just as the pressure becomes unbearable, an ear-splitting sound erupts from high atop the monastery wall and echoes throughout the river valley, throughout all of Italy.

Whistling.

A single shrill, wavering note, piercing the silence suffocating us and striking cold terror into the very deepest parts of my being. 

It trails to an end, pauses for a beat, before another note comes, lower in pitch and oscillating into my injured ears, climbing into my skull, scratching deep into my head and tying itself in knots around my every thought, deafening around my ears and even _more_ so inside my body. The sound fills every part of me and takes over, and I can’t breathe anymore.

The whistle fades to nothing. The silence returns. Thom’s eyes widen and widen, and all I see is the fucking moon.

A scream starts to break the silence, but it’s quickly cut off, crushed into a bubbling gurgle and a wretched, nauseous _snap, crunch,_ and then everything falls into discord around me.

Men are running, shooting, screaming, sobbing, and _something_ flickers through the spaces between us like an apparition.

Something with claws.

The vile moonlight shines deathly blue on the arcing sprays of blood erupting from the men around me, from the gashes that sever their limbs and spill their guts and defile their shocked faces, and the sounds of their ribs snapping and shattering fills the air under the choked, wet sounds of their souls being ripped from their bodies still _fucking beating._

I can’t focus, I can’t breathe, I can’t see what’s gutting my men, but I’m fucking _covered in their blood and I can’t I can’t I can’t—_

Claws shine bright blue, leaving streaks of light as the only clue to their trail, too fast to see and _unearthly_ in power, and the lightning strike that carves Reynolds’ throat right out of his body passes just in front of my _fucking face,_ I’m covered in Reynolds’ blood, his blood, it’s _hot, so fucking hot God help me!_ He’s still clinging to me, this bear of a man, his jaw hanging askew at an unnatural tilt, oh _God,_ and as Thom squirms out from beneath me, all I can do is fucking _watch_ as Reynolds’ life leaves his drooping body.

Oh God.

The shrieks dwindle into nothing, the cracking and splintering of all the men around me trailing into deathly silence, and the river of blood surges renewed around my knees in sickly wet slops, oh _God._

Thom—

Thom?

I whip my head around, tears streaking through the thick blood like paint dripping down my face, into my eyes, into my mouth, _where’s Thom—_

“—though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death—” 

Thom’s voice slips through the deafening hum.

“—I will fear no evil—”

I turn and raise my eyes to the cratered wasteland between the trench and the Krauts.

“—for Thou art with me—”

Thom clasps his hands in fervent prayer where he kneels atop the rock, silhouetted through the smoke by the blazing moonlight, facing the heavens as he casts his broken soul to God. His voice is loud, growing louder in the silence drowning the two of us, the only two left _alive—_

Footsteps.

_Heavy_ footsteps.

Something emerges from the monastery shade wreathing the German camp in total darkness, striding gracefully upright through gutted rock and charred mountain earth to stand before Thom on the hill, something fucking _massive,_ twisted, blasphemous, something whose own shadow brings with it the icy chill of death itself.

It towers high above him, its thick hair radiant silver in the blinding moonlight, some unholy hybrid of man and beast whose bloody, razor-tipped claws glisten and shine as it considers Thom’s frantic prayers. 

Sitting in this beast’s ghastly shadow, I am further from God than I have ever been.

Slowly, slowly, Thom spreads his arms wide to expose his chest, welcoming the evil intent that radiates off the beast in crashing waves.

The beast leans its massive head back and _screams,_ clamoring, joyfully singing in demon tongue to its profane masters, the sound ear-splitting and dizzying in its force, _painful,_ before it looks back down at Thom and reaches down to lovingly sink its claws into his shoulders, his chest, punching through his ribs and spearing both of his paper lungs. He gasps, but the sound is choked and wet. He’s drowning, drowning in his own blood as the beast lifts him off the ground by his fragile bones. 

He doesn’t struggle.

He barely twitches.

My vision twists and blurs as my heart rams against my ribs, my stomach heaving, and no matter how ruined my ears are, I cannot block out the sound of Thomas Wagner’s chest warping and caving in beneath the crushing force of the beast’s powerful jaw.

I hear every rib snap.

My body gives up on my mind then, and I’m slipping and scrambling to my feet without knowing how or why or where. Blood smears across the rocks under my hands as I scrabble up out of the ditch, away, away from the beast, away from Thom’s deathly gurgling, away from the ruined, desecrated corpses littering the hills below Monte Cassino.

I am not in control of my body as it bolts through the blue darkness. I slide down steep, unforgiving slopes and slop through muddy slush and trip over deep cracks in the rock and I might be screaming, but I can’t summon the will to stop. 

I flee down onto the sprawling plains, sprinting faster than I ever have, and no matter how much distance I put between myself and that foul, Godless hillside, I cannot escape the frozen shadow of that _beast,_ the Devil that stalks this wounded earth.

My legs burn, my lungs burn, my heart is thundering in my chest and my head, but I’m _not fast enough._

I hear the beast behind me.

Its breath is overpowering, the stench of blood and torn flesh dizzying, horrifying, panting out in great gusts behind me as its massive feet slam into the ground with the force of an earthquake with every strike, a terrible drumbeat swarming my head and screaming in my skull, it _hurts,_ everything hurts, _God—_

Those pounding paws crash against the earth with a last, deep _crack_ before a quiet instant, quiet but for my own wheezing gasps.

Then the sky falls down on me.

Something _heavy,_ heavier than a jeep, than a fucking _tank_ barrels into me from behind, shattering the long-forgotten rifle hanging over my shoulder, and I’m still screaming when I curl into a little ball and try, _try_ to roll somewhere, anywhere. The beast has a vice grip around my waist, squeezing and squeezing until a rib breaks, then another and another, and as we roll across the unforgiving earth with the brute force of the beast’s momentum, I’m flailing and squirming and lashing out, trying and trying to _get away, to escape—_

A massive, bloody hand curves around my head and smashes my face against the frozen ground, knocking my brain loose with a few teeth.

It doesn’t let go, and there’s an oppressive weight on my legs even though I’m kicking and scrambling and hollering, and when I fling my left arm back in search of an eye or a nose, another enormous hand encircles my wrist and snaps my arm like a twig, _Christ._

Then—

Heat.

Around my whole bent-back arm, horribly wet and boiling, and something white-hot sears a thick, curved line into my flesh at my shoulder. My chest burns, my toes dig uselessly into the resistant valley soil, and somewhere in the stinking humidity swarming me, I hear a feeble _snap_ as the heat presses against my left collarbone.

My hand is _wet._

Screaming, screaming, I flail and buck and struggle against the white-hot stench scorching my flesh even through my shredded uniform, and my movement jostles the clamps loose.

Something sharp rakes down my bicep before the white-hot pressure returns, and the Devil _snarls_ at me, the sound enveloping me, and I howl and squirm and the pointed vice slips again, digs in, slips farther, clenches again just above my elbow, and _Christ I’m on fire,_ my flesh feels like brimstone and I can’t think I can’t breathe I can’t move.

All I can see is the blood red moon swallowing up the faded stars.

Hellfire drags in jagged, branding lines down my chest, and I scream for God, for mercy.

For death.

I _beg_ for death.

The Devil holds me in its claws as my soul vacates my body.

I can’t feel my arm, nor my legs. My vision blurs, spins, upside down and right-side up, doubling and darkening with the fading of my breath.

The last thing I feel is the Devil’s murderous exhale ruffling my blood-matted hair.

\--

Muffled voices ripple up from the blackness. Strangers. One harsh, forceful. One shivering, mumbling, reluctant.

Thump, thump, thump...

Silence. Just silence.

A slow sigh.

_‘Alright, um...’_ The softer voice. Soothing. The muffled, distorted sound of metal on metal, tag on tag on cross. _‘Jean.’_

All I can manage is a weak exhale.

_‘I—I-I’m sorry, Jean.’_


	2. Prisoners of War

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It must be some God-given miracle that I'm still here, but this strange place I've woken up in... it's walking the thin line between prison and Purgatory.
> 
> At least I'm not alone here.
> 
> **I.**
> 
> _February 1944. Allied forces fight their way north through German-occupied Italy toward Rome, hoping to wrest control of the peninsula from Hitler in what would become the costliest Western campaign in the course of the Second World War._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have a [tumblr](http://avoidingavoidance.tumblr.com)
> 
> also wow holy shit sorry for that delay, i've been trying to dig my way out of the deep pit of writer's block for a while, so here's hoping it's all downhill from here @@

I know this dream.

A hundred times I’ve woken up here, a thousand times I’ve dreamed of this awful darkness, but it’s been many, many years since I opened my eyes only to find the oppressive gloom of the disused cellar beneath my childhood home.

When I was very small, I used to sleepwalk. Often.

At least once a week, I would open my tired eyes and find myself standing in the pitch black of the heavily-locked cellar, with no recollection of taking the noisy keys from my mother’s bedside table, and certainly no recollection of making my way down through the maze of cobwebs wire-thick with dust hanging heavy from the ceiling of the stairwell.

I know this dream, and worse yet, I know what comes next.

 _‘It’s just a dream’_ means nothing here.

My body is that of a combat-battered, underfed twenty-one-year-old soldier, but my heart is that of a four-year-old boy who just tasted perdition for the first time in his short life, weak and frail and slamming against my hollow bird bones as if trying desperately to escape.

I rapidly blink the thick dust from my eyes, from my tangled eyelashes. The charred furniture haphazardly piled against the walls seems to crowd closer and closer around me, still stinking of ash and kerosene even after all these years stored away, hidden far out of sight.

Before me, the sealed cellar door looms atop the warped stairs, and the only color in existence comes from the bright, bright red light on the other side, seeping in sinister tendrils around the edges of the heavy wood, through the bare gap between the door and the top stair.

My knees knock together.

I know I’m in hell.

I’ve always known that my eternal damnation would take the form of this horrid crypt. There exists on God’s earth no place more abhorrent than this for me, and it has never escaped my certainty that the sins of my father would entomb me in this silent, arson-reeking torment. I must have died on that frozen river plain far beneath Monte Cassino, held captive by the burning light of the vast, bloodthirsty moon, the burden of the Devil crouched atop me crushing me into the unforgiving valley dirt, and with no time to atone for the awful things I’ve done, I find myself once again locked in the cold, lifeless earth beneath my home.

My heart is still pounding. No matter how hard I dig my teeth into my cracked lips, fat, hot tears now streak through the grime smeared across my face. My entire fragile body quakes under the weight of my fear.

A shadow moves through the piercing red light, cutting black through the violent beam. Two small feet standing on the other side of the door. 

I can’t hold back the sob this time, my heaving chest the only part of me not frozen in utter terror.

The dense, oppressive silence is shattered by the mute rattle of the old doorknob slowly, slowly, _slowly_ turning.

\--

I bolt upright with a cracking gasp, breaking free from that hellscape drenched in frozen sweat, straining for air like I’d been drowning, and for a moment, I can’t even focus long enough to take in my surroundings. 

I hear a startled voice to my left, and the clanking of chains that echoes from my scrabbling feet, chains linked to enormous, heavy shackles locked around my bare ankles—

Still struggling to breathe, I shoot my hand out in the direction of the voice and find fabric, clothing, so I fist my shaking fingers in it and yank close a person—a person holding a _needle, fuck._ Before I register anything else about him, I’m snarling in his shocked face, his huge dark eyes bloodshot and growing more nervous with every thunder crash of my pounding heart.

I try to reach up and snatch the syringe with my other hand, but my wrists are shackled too, and whatever I’m chained to jolts, almost tilts under me with the force of my aborted strike. I rattle the guy, growling, and he’s speaking, but I can’t make out any of his words through the tinny shrill echoing around my skull.

 _“Wer bist du?!”_ I bellow in his face, shaking him more and _hating_ the vile language spilling too easily from my tongue. I try for the needle again, and the heavy chains scream and jostle but do not give. _“Was ist das? Wer bist du?!”_

“It’s okay!” the man insists loudly, his words finally reaching me as he holds his wavering hands up in surrender. “Jean, _you’re okay._ It’s just medicine for your wounds. I-I’m trying to help you.”

His voice is strangely gentle, even at this volume. The same voice I’d heard through the deathly fog wreathing my nightmares. Surprisingly American, too, albeit laced with the distinct curve of an unfamiliar foreign accent, prominent enough that he’s probably not a German spy. They’re much too thorough for that. 

Even so, I do not trust him. 

My jaw aches from the pressure of my grinding teeth, loud enough to hear over the electric silence between us.

“Put it down,” I growl. _“Slowly.”_

“Alright, Jean,” he soothes, his hands still held up where I can see them. “Alright.” With an audible swallow, he carefully places the metal syringe on an instrument tray beside him, then gives the tray a push. It must stand on wheels, because it clanks and trundles away, past the rusting frame of the dingy bed I’m chained to, far enough that neither of us could easily reach it. He sucks on his lips then, blinking huge doe eyes at me as he raises his hand again and waits for me to decide what to do with him.

I’m not terribly willing to let him out of my sight, even with the solid grip I have on his shirt, so I don’t spare much more than a cursory glance at my surroundings for now. 

Dark stone walls, dark stone floor, firelight from fucking _torches_ mounted on wall brackets feebly lighting the narrow, windowless catacomb around us. The longer walls are lined with more beds similar to my own, arrayed evenly like a hospital ward, some occupied by piles of sheets or unmoving corpses. It’s hard to tell in the gloom.

When I turn my attention back to the man, I look him over for weapons, but find nothing obvious, nothing that jumps out at me. Just his dirty, half-buttoned GI shirt hanging open over his undershirt, the collars of both heavily wrinkled in my tight fist, dark trousers, and an absolutely filthy apron starting to slip between his thighs. The metal stool he’s seated on squeaks as he shifts awkwardly under my sharp stare, swallowing again.

I pause long enough to _breathe_ for once, taking a moment to get my shit together, which for some reason seems to bring him some small measure of relief. 

From what I can tell by dismal firelight, he’s fairly dark-skinned, and miles cleaner than I am right now, like he hasn’t spent much time crawling through the charred winter mud lately. His black hair is mussed, stuck up all over in uneven cowlicks, and the ends of his unkempt bangs curl on his sweaty brow. Dark freckles all over his face make him look absurdly young, sunspots scattered across his high cheekbones and his forehead, dusted over what I can make out of his wrists and forearms.

He sure _looks_ innocuous, but then again, he was coming at me with a needle when I woke up chained to a bed in a damn rock box.

Even disregarding his whole situation, I still have a hundred thousand questions that need answering, each of them more pressing than the last. He waits patiently while I chew on them for a minute. Not like he has much choice in the matter, anyway.

“How do you know my name?” I finally spit out, my dry voice cracking.

He exhales shakily, his fingers relaxing slightly, but he keeps them raised, still on edge from the way my bony knuckles grind into the base of his long throat. “Your tags,” he murmurs, gesturing toward my chest with his chin. “You still have them, and your cross. I didn’t take them.”

My nostrils flare. I look around again, checking for movement and finding none. There’s a hollow archway at the far end of the room, leading out into nothing but pitch black. In the corner next to my bed, there’s a messy desk stacked high with yellowing papers and yellowed books, long, thick streams of candle wax forming lumpy columns down the side to the dirty floor.

This whole room stinks of rust and old blood.

“U-um,” he says softly, hesitantly, drawing my attention again. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“That don’t mean I won’t hurt you,” I retort, stiffly shuffling myself more upright on the squeaky bed. 

“Ah. Right.”

“The fuck is this place?” Glancing upwards, I find nothing but more stone, the same damn rock that makes up the walls and floor of this rank mausoleum. 

There’s a thick brown splatter on the high ceiling a few beds down, old enough to have faded into a shadow amongst flickering shadows.

I don’t want to think about that. 

I look back down at my hostage, shaking him just enough to help him get his words unstuck. 

“It’s, um. A hospital of sorts. I take care of the soldiers who’re brought here, patch them up and everything.” He smiles feebly, eyes still wide and nervous, hesitantly seeking my trust. I just stare at him.

“So you’re a doctor?”

“Not really, no,” he sighs. “I just kind of ended up here. You know how it is, you slap a tourniquet on a leg one time and suddenly you’re a medic.”

Against my better judgment, I relax slightly, breathing a vaguely amused snort in response. Shaking my aching head quickly, I tighten my fist and press my knuckles against his throat more firmly, warning him against getting comfortable around me. He seems to get it, based on the way he stiffens up and his lips narrow into a thin line.

“Who are you?” I ask again, in English this time.

“My name is Marco,” he supplies readily. The slight roll of his tongue around the name reminds me suddenly of the migrant workers back home, the kind, gentle men and women who breathed life into my little hometown. The other end of his accent, though, is distinctly different. “I’m from New York,” Marco continues, as if he’s following the pattern of my thoughts. “I came over to fight the Jerries, found myself in some hot water, and now I’m here.”

I purse my lips thoughtfully. “You a Mexican?”

For the first time, something akin to annoyance flashes over Marco’s face, and when he sits up straighter, it’s with pride this time, rather than fear. “No. I’m Cuban.” He looks me over sternly, then asks, “Is that going to be a problem for you?”

My brow furrows, but I back down under his stare, lowering my gaze to his knees. “No.”

“Good.” He softens slightly, sucking on his lips again, before he says, “You’re from the South, right? Your accent—”

“Don’t fuckin’ get chummy with me,” I snarl, seizing control of my composure again. I don’t know what it is about Marco that gets me to drop it so easy, but it can’t be a good thing. “We ain’t friends.”

“Right, right, sorry,” he mumbles, a frown curving his lips. “Just... trying to make conversation. I haven’t really had a patient who could talk in quite some time. Forgive me.”

Rather than try to figure out what that might mean, and what it might mean for the dark stain on the ceiling, I glance around again, then rattle my chains pointedly. “So if I’m American, and you’re American, why the fuck am I cuffed to the bed?”

Marco bites his lip, finally lowering his hands to his lap. He does so slowly, so as not to arouse my suspicion, and loosely twists his fingers together. “We both have our chains.”

I snort. “Yeah?” He nods, and I sneer, “I don’t see shit on you.”

He just shakes his head, turning to look over his shoulder, toward the dark archway. “Trust me, Jean, I’m as much a prisoner here as you.”

Marco’s got one of those boyish faces, like he’s barely out of high school or something. Now, though... for some reason, right now he looks so much older than he’s letting on, aged by the burden of whatever unseen ties bind him to this place.

Either he’s a great actor, or he really is trapped here.

Regardless, my arm’s getting tired and holding onto his shirts hasn’t gotten me much of anywhere, so I loosen my creaking fingers from wrinkled fabric and let my hand drop. He shoots me a small, grateful smile, idly smoothing the sweaty folds mussing his collar.

“So this is, what, a POW camp?” I ask after a minute, twiddling my fingers in the sheets. 

“Something like that, yes,” he says. He rolls his loose sleeves up over his elbows, getting himself nice and comfortable, before lacing his fingers between his knees. 

“And you work for the Krauts.”

He purses his lips and squints. “I wouldn’t say so. I can’t really tell you much about it. Sorry.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Both.” He smiles crookedly, the soft sadness to it more than a little disarming.

As my heart finally settles into a vaguely normal rhythm, the hairs on my nape no longer prickling anxiously, I start noticing a haze creeping around the edges of my thoughts. Morphine, or something like it. Making me sleepy. I groan, digging the heel of my hand into my eye. “How did I get here? Last thing I remember—”

I must have still been in shock, right up until now.

My chest tightens.

Tightens, tightens, tightens, and I’m suddenly _far_ too aware of every stinging, burning, aching pain ripping jagged holes through my paper skin, and just like that, my heart’s thundering again, hard enough that it might well explode.

I’m struggling to breathe, frantically looking around, panic rushing, swelling in my veins, and _my arm isn’t broken._ I stare down at it, babbling, and I hear Marco trying to soothe me, but for God’s _sake_ my arm isn’t _broken,_ but I remember so fucking clearly the gut-wrenching crack and the blistering _agony_ of my elbow snapping in fucking _half—_

Last thing I remember, the Devil himself was gnawing on my arm and trying to carve my frail soul out of my chest still beating.

I look down at myself, fucking _finally,_ slapping at my unbroken, bandaged arm, my shoulder, the monstrous, vine-like bruises seared into my wrist by the beast’s unholy grip. 

My chest is bound in thick white bandages soaked brown in the shape of jagged claw wounds, charred echoes of that hellfire brand.

Oh _God,_ everything _hurts—_

I clutch my aching, screaming head, whimpering and curling into a little ball, trying desperately to hide from the pain, the terror.

I have no fucking idea what’s real anymore.

“ _Jean,_ ” comes Marco’s voice, the mute squeak of his tray coming to a stop beside me. “Jean, I _swear_ I’m not trying to hurt you—”

All I hear is the crack and crunch of Thom’s ribs, fading in and out of the Whistler’s damning call like radio static.

I can’t help it.

I curl further into myself, burying my face in my sharp knees, and I’m sobbing for God before I can even think to try and breathe. Half-choked prayers muffled by musty sheets are all I can manage, my hands fisting tighter in my filthy hair, the pull of stitches over my ear where shrapnel pierced my helmet, the shrapnel from a bomb aimed at a _desecrated corpse with its heart ripped from its chest—_

My body rocks with the force of my heaving sobs, and Marco’s steady words are lost to me, but the firmness of his grasp on my left arm, my _broken_ arm is not. My elbow bends just like normal, like it hadn’t been shattered and devoured by the shade of evil incarnate, and my heels kick in the sheets again, but Marco manages to push me back onto the bed and hold down my arching, thrashing, screaming body with his knee as he drives a needle into the impossibly intact crook of my elbow.

All that remains of the Devil’s foul breath is the burn from my left shoulder down my bicep, the rake of razor teeth _boiling_ under yet more bandages, under the steel grip of Marco’s hand as he holds me still, fills my veins with something, _something,_ he swears it’s just medicine—

I’m pleading, sobbing, writhing on the bed and screaming for God, and when I squeeze my eyes shut, I see nothing but the ravenous blood moon looming ever closer, clamoring for the tattered remains of my soul.

Marco’s hand lets up as the needle slides out of my skin, the restraining pressure there vanishing, and as I drag in a deep, heaving, drowning breath, pulsing daylight floods my body and swallows me whole.

It takes a minute or two for my heart to settle, for my breathing to steady, for my body to relax, but that time feels to me like a vacant century.

Gentle fingers rub the bend of my elbow, chasing the rush with a soothing, comforting tingle.

Whatever Marco put in me, it’s not just morphine. I know what morphine feels like.

Every muscle in my body loosens, even my livewire spine, my fingers clenched in the sheets. Once I’ve collapsed back against the bed, helplessly gaping at the ceiling, Marco slides his knee off my hips, off the bed again with a sigh.

The only thing I can think to do is cry, so I do. I stare at the ceiling and cry, and I close my burning eyes and cry more, and even when consciousness slips away from me and Marco’s soft murmuring and shuffling fades into blackness, all I can do is cry.

Suddenly, I understand Thom so much more than I’ve ever understood another human being before in my life.

And now he’s gone.

Eaten alive.

God help us all.

\--

I’m still crying when I smell old fire again. 

I don’t know what’s real anymore.

A thousand times I’ve had this dream, opening my swollen eyes to darkness so dense it weighs down the air around me, flooding my lungs like black wood smoke and threatening to suffocate me, and I am no longer sure that this is really just a dream.

The silence pressing in around me is cold, malicious, frost crystals blooming in the salt lingering at the corners of my eyes, and even though the chill burns my throat to breathe, I can’t stop sniffling, gasping, whimpering in the mute gloom. I grit my teeth and blink rapidly, fisting my icy fingers tight in an attempt to regain control, but the tears won’t stop flowing now.

Every tear I’ve refused to cry since the day stern men in uniforms darkened my mother’s doorstep flows now like a waterfall, a cascading torrent that I am helpless to stop. Almost a decade’s worth of tears, angry and guilty and hopeless, all dripping from my chin and staining my shirt, splattering the packed dirt floor of the cellar like ice rain, and still more come. My mother always hated to see me cry, so I swore never to cry again the day I had to become a man. And yet, here I stand once more, trapped in my childish hell, drenched in my childish tears, no more a man than the four-year-old boy who first awoke in the dark with the acrid taste of hellfire spreading over his dry tongue.

I’m overwhelmed by the reek of kerosene, by the silty taste of ashes that still refuse to settle, and my head is _throbbing_ from how hard I’m crying, but I can’t fucking stop, not now that the floodgates have collapsed. 

I must be losing my mind.

My arm was _destroyed._ I felt it. I _felt_ the hot spatter of pouring blood, tendons snapping, the sickening grind of bone on splintered bone. I felt it. It was _real._

And yet...

And yet, I awoke in a mausoleum painted in old blood, threatened the only other breathing creature in God knows how many miles with that same arm, bent and flexed and extended that same fucking arm without so much as a sore twinge.

I have stitches in my scalp from before my arm broke. Those are still real. 

I have bandages around my clawed chest stained with dry blood from after my arm broke. Those are still real.

Everything stands to memory but my arm, and that alone is enough to sow the seed of doubt underneath everything I know.

There is no light from beneath the cellar door now. No red, nor white. Nothing. The door may not even be there. I can’t tell.

Squeezing my burning eyes shut, I crouch down and bury my face in my knees again, trying to make myself as tiny as possible. If I’m small enough, maybe I’ll cease to exist altogether.

The dirt floor beneath my bony white feet is beginning to turn to thick mud, soaked through and loosened from my tears pouring and pouring and pouring into it. My toes spread through the mud, then sink into it, leaving tiny child footprints where once stood a man.

I cry until the entire floor of the cellar turns to earthen sludge, blackened river mud full of toads and worms and the drowned soldiers of the Whistler’s unholy army, and I cry some more while I wait for that shrill command to echo through the trees.

It never comes.

I wish it would have.

From the top of the dark stairs, three sharp knocks echo through the unseen wood of the cellar door, and ice floods down my bent spine.

\--

My eyes flutter open to find flickering shadows on stone, tricks of the wavering firelight stretching across the high ceiling of this tomb of a hospital ward.

Still here, it seems.

I want to sit up, to look around, look for Marco, but I feel like I’m floating in the thin sheets wrapped around me. Like my soul is too weak to power my body. All the pains from before are gone, or hovering beneath me, distinct from my body in some strange way and thus unable to inflict agony upon me. 

_This_ is morphine.

Breathing slowly, deeply, I close my eyes again and focus instead on listening.

For a while, all I hear is the soft crackling of the torches. Marco must not be here. That, or he’s unusually good at being silent. I don’t even hear breathing from any of the other beds, nor pained groans, nor restless shifting or chains clanking. 

I am well and truly alone.

Normally, the thought would strike icy fear through me. I do not like being alone. With as much morphine as I’m on, though, my heart keeps beating calmly, and I keep listening to the sound of fire, free from the half-buried memories of that night for the time being.

Eventually, I do hear footsteps, echoing from far, far away and coming closer. They stride yet closer, the pace easy and familiar, until they move without pause past the blackened entrance to my solitary confinement. They grow further again, moving away from me, until they leave me once again isolated.

I don’t have the energy to wonder how many other wards there might be, or how many other trapped medics. How many guards. How far beneath the earth I might be.

Luckily, I’m saved the effort when my dazed ears manage to catch the soft sound of music.

The echo of a piano now lilts through the black halls, blossoming from the direction the footsteps had gone. It’s faint, far away and further muted by the drug haze, but I can still tell well enough that it’s slow and sweet, a tune well-known and loved by the hands carefully bringing it to life.

The notes twinkle like glass bells, winding and curling in delicate shapes through the cool air, coming more softly, more slowly, until they pause as if for breath. I find myself unconsciously holding my own in anticipation. 

With the cascade of sound that tumbles down from that peak comes a voice, a gentle, steady voice singing in a language I can’t quite figure out, and as that sweet song washes over me in a soothing tide, I let myself sink gratefully beneath its welcoming surface. 

When consciousness slips again from my numb fingertips, I simply cease to exist for a while, blessedly absolved of the stink of kerosene. 

\--

I never really had many friends back home. Some of that actually _was_ my fault. Even when I was young, I was always too prickly, picked too many fights, got too impatient. I was quick to find fault in people, and even quicker to hold it against them.

Now, it’s different. I still see the fault, sure, but now I just don’t have it in me to care one way or another, nor do I have the luxury. 

For example. Reynolds. Big, hairy bear of a man, somehow never caught shit from officers for cultivating a full, scratchy beard on the lines, always so relaxed about everything that just being around him made everyone else half as smart and twice as lazy. He was contagious, God rest his soul.

I still bunked with him. Knew him damn well, too. Sometimes you learn more about a person during cold nights spent in careful quiet than you do listening to their bullshit stories in the light of day.

I think I still have his blood crusted on my skin in spots.

As for Thom, before he crumpled under the harrowing weight of things no man was ever meant to bear witness to, he was just a noisy fucking idiot. I punched him in the face once in high school. He earned it.

If my mother could see me now, if she could see how little I care about those petty flaws now, how easily I settle into comfortable camaraderie with the other men, she’d be damn proud of me.

I don’t know half of anything about Marco. I don’t know anything about New York, or Cuba, or how he ended up here and how long ago, or how he ended up playing nurse for the enemy. I doubt I’ll get any kind of straight answers out of him, neither. I’ll have to take everything he says with a boulder of salt, just as he’ll have to do with me.

I know all that, and I don’t really care. He’s _alive._

When you spend as much time as I have covered in your friends’ blood, watching the light drain from their eyes if they even have a head left to drain light out of, you learn to take what you can get, flaws or no. 

You’d be surprised what you can put up with when the alternative is dying alone.

\--

I’m somewhere between awake and asleep when Marco comes by again, but I still manage to smell him coming long before he strides into the room.

I hadn’t realized how fucking _hungry_ I was until just now, but God in Heaven, how long has it been since I’ve eaten? How long ago was my last meal, the last subpar rations to stretch the shrunken bellies of doomed men sent to relieve doomed men?

My point is, Marco is carrying food, and right now I really don’t even care if he fucking poisons me with it. I doubt he’d waste the effort, anyway. If he wanted me dead, he could do it at any time. I’m chained to my fucking bed and I sleep more than a damn cat. It’d be a turkey shoot.

“Oh, Jean,” he says once he sees me struggling to sit upright in anticipation of whatever he’s got. “You’re awake! That’s a relief.” He bustles over and sets the bowl on his desk, then helps me sit up, taking care for my still-aching ribs and my stitched-shut everything. Once I’m leaning against the squeaky iron bars of the headboard with a grimace, he goes back for the bowl, then turns and hands it right to me, no pretense.

Even once I’ve gotten a good look at the food, I don’t know what it is. I still don’t care. 

Groaning raggedly, I forgo the spoon Marco’s offering me and just hold the lumpy wood bowl right up to my lips, swallowing down sour dungeon stew like it’s the finest thing I ever tasted. And shit, it may as well be, seeing as I can’t seem to remember anything that came before army rations. Everything comes out of cans, and it all tastes like cans, too. Don’t matter.

This doesn’t taste like cans. I don’t know what it does taste like, but the lack of a metallic tang staining the roof of my mouth immediately endears it to me.

“Wow,” I hear Marco murmur finally. He’s sitting beside me, having pulled his stool over from the desk, his chin propped in his hand as he watches me with wide eyes.

Swallowing heavily, I lower the bowl, then hold it out to him and croak, “Here, eat some.”

“Oh, no, no,” he hums, sitting up straight and shaking his head. “Thank you, though. You need to get your strength up.”

I squint at him. “You got any food in you?”

“Gee, Jean,” Marco laughs, “You sound like my mother.” He smiles widely, insistently shaking his head again, then gently presses the bowl back toward me. “Don’t you worry about me, okay? I manage. I’m honestly just surprised you can stomach that.”

“It’s good,” I mumble, before I tilt the bowl up and suck down the rest of it, stringy meat and soggy potatoes and all. It’s still hot when it settles in my cavernous stomach, the warmth of it quick to spread out through the rest of my body, which almost immediately puts me right back to sleep. Not surprising. 

Once I set the now-empty bowl on my lap, Marco takes it from me and puts it aside, seemingly impressed by my appetite. “Well, while I have you,” he says, “Is it okay if I change your bandages and ask you some questions? Or would you rather go back to sleep for now?”

I just blink at him. Probably somewhat stupidly.

It’s only half because I’m full and sleepy.

The other half is entirely deep-seated dread.

What the fuck am I supposed to tell him about how exactly I got this torn up? Or about the rather serious injury I appear to be missing? Or any of the other shit that happened just before I got messed up, or the days before that? I remember too clearly how skeptical I’d been when Thom told me about the Whistler. How I hadn’t understood until it was far, far too late.

I have no idea how much Marco knows about what caused my injuries, and I’m genuinely afraid of what might happen to me if I tell him.

I guess my face gives away my fear.

“Okay, okay,” Marco hums gently before I can answer him, reaching over to give my good shoulder a light pat. “We can save it, there’s no rush just yet.” He stands and moves to his desk again, and as he’s poking through a leaning tower of books and papers, he continues, “I do want to start taking you off the morphine soon, though, so I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you about your pain... here you are.” He tugs a file out, presumably mine, and returns to his stool, pulling out a stubby pencil from behind his ear.

Running my trembling hands down my face, I take a deep, steadying breath and slump back against the headboard even more. “Marco, look—”

“Just your pain, Jean,” Marco soothes. “Oh, and your head. Just focus on those for now. Everything else will come in time.” He smiles again, and wavering shadows from the torchlight pool in a dimple on his cheek, adding yet again to the disarming youthfulness of his appearance. 

Moving slowly, carefully, he reaches up and slides his fingers into the grimy hair above my right ear, and for a moment it almost feels like he’s tucking my hair behind it until his fingers brush over the stitches hidden there. The touch is light enough that they don’t pull or twinge, but I still tense up at the feeling, reminded once more of the hot bomb blast, of violent moonlight pooling between shattered ribs.

“That hurts?”

I shake my head, lips tight.

“Okay, good...” Marco hums and scoots closer, reaching to feel around my scalp in search of more wounds. I can only assume he’ll find some. 

His fingers dislodge something from my hair a few inches above the stitches, whatever it is crumbling and dropping lightly onto my shoulder. Marco’s brow furrows until he looks closer and realizes that it’s just dirt.

Dirt from where the beast cracked my skull against the ground, its claws wrapped around my head like a Goddamn baseball. 

My chest tightens.

“I keep finding more dirt on you every time I look,” Marco chuckles, leaning over to catch my eye. “Maybe I should hose you down or something, hm?”

I snort weakly at that, my shoulders loosening just barely. “You got a shower around here somewhere?”

Marco laughs loudly and lets his fingers slip out of my hair, seemingly satisfied with the state of my battered head. “Plumbing? _Here_? In my dreams, maybe.” He pauses to jot down some notes, then leans forward again. “Could you open your mouth?”

Pursing my lips slightly, I run my tongue across my teeth, finding two gaps that weren’t there before Monte Cassino. They ache dully when I poke at them with my tongue. I open my mouth anyway, and he glances in and hums to himself before making another note.

“Tongue’s looking better... looks like two broken molars, too, those’ll grow back just fine,” he mutters to himself, idly chewing on his thumbnail. My brow furrows at that.

“Marco, I’m twenty-one, not twelve. Baby teeth are long gone.” He blinks up at me, opening his mouth to reply, but he apparently thinks better of it and just gives me a twitchy smile.

“O-oh, right. Sorry, I’m no dentist.” He quails under my narrowing squint, clearing his throat and burying his face in my file. “Uh. Does anything in particular hurt right now?”

I sigh, letting him deflect. I’m too tired to squeeze him for being weird, anyway.

Instead, I stare down at my left elbow, at the pale red puncture over the vein where Marco injected the medicine. That little dot is the only mark there, _still,_ and it’s barely a mosquito bite at that. Not so much as a bruise. I reach over and pinch it, trying and failing to pull even a drop of blood from it.

“Everything’s fine,” I mumble after a long minute, pressing the cool tips of my fingers into the bend of my arm. “Nothing hurts right now.”

Marco watches me feel out my elbow, the quiet between us tense, before he sighs, “I’m glad to hear it.”

He stuffs his pencil behind his ear again, apparently satisfied with my condition for now, and while I’m in no mood to answer questions or think about much of anything, I’m not really ready for him to leave just yet, either. 

I don’t like being alone. Especially when I may or may not be going insane.

“Hey, Marco.”

“Yes?”

Blinking up at him, I chew on my cracked lip for a moment while he tilts his head in question. “What, uh,” I start, fishing around for something to ask him, something to keep him here until I feel a little less like I’m about to break into a thousand tiny pieces. I finally settle on, “What outfit you with?”

“Mm... I’ve been here so long,” he replies cryptically, idly folding and unfolding a corner of his report. “I don’t know that it even matters anymore. It’s not like I’d know how to find any of my commanding officers, anyway.”

I huff, which he seems to find amusing, for whatever reason. “What do your friends call you?”

He pauses, considering my expression, then smiles grimly. “I don’t have any.”

“Shit, Marco,” I groan, scrubbing a hand down my face. 

“Sorry, sorry,” he chuckles, before he leans toward me and asks, “Well, what do _your_ friends call you?”

“Stick.” 

Marco blinks widely, then snorts, his smile softening again. “Aptly so, I suppose.”

“Yeah...” Everyone who ever called me Stick is dead. Reynolds was the last of them. I swallow heavily. “I mean, people _used_ to call me Stick.”

“Not anymore?”

All my friends are dead.

The feeling is not new.

I shake my head minutely, my brow furrowing and my eyes stinging with tears I refuse to shed, and I think Marco catches my drift.

“Well, um,” he murmurs, taking his sweet time standing up. “I’ll let you rest for now, yeah? I’ll come back later to check in on you. If you need anything, just shout, I’ll hear you.”

For lack of any better response, I just nod mutely, still fiddling with my sheet. Marco hovers for a moment, hesitating, before he lightly pats my bony knee and makes his way out of the room again.

Still sleepy from morphine and from hot food, I fall asleep again quickly, and by some grace from God I dream about nothing but warm, bristly beard hair gently tickling my throat.

\--

I smell smoke.

Not wood smoke, nor the sputtering breath of torch smoke, but savory tobacco smoke, and the fragrance awakens in me an urge to rise again from the quiet void I’d nestled into.

Exhaling shakily, I work up the strength to summon dry, feeble words before I can even will my eyes to open, which is just fine with me.

“You got another one?”

My voice apparently startles whoever’s smoking, based on the embarrassing squeak they make, along with the sound of a knee cracking against the underside of a desk.

“ _Ay, Jean,_ ” Marco bleats. I manage a crooked grin at his expense, which earns me a stern click of the tongue. I can’t help it. I’m apparently still on enough morphine that I have an actual sense of humor.

While Marco’s gathering his composure, I manage to at least pry open my bleary eyes, peering around until I find him huffing and straightening another towering pile of paperwork at his desk, half a cigarette hanging from his pursed lips. It smells fucking _heavenly._

Picking up a soft pack from under an overturned book, Marco wheels his stool over to my bedside, a smile now quirking the corners of his lips in spite of the start I’d given him. “I must’ve been well-behaved lately,” he murmurs. “Usually the men just bring me whatever cheap smokes they can use to keep me quiet, but _today—”_

Marco plucks his cigarette from his mouth as his smile widens to a grin, before he proudly holds up a short white pack, one I daydream about more frequently than I’d like to admit.

“Holy shit,” I rumble, life returning to my body at that welcome sight. “ _I_ can’t even fuckin’ get Lucky Strikes, man, the officers smoke ‘em all before the ration truck hits us.”

Nodding sagely, Marco sets the pack on the bed beside me and carefully helps me sit up enough to lean against the cold bars of the headboard, cigarette held again between his lips. Once I’m relatively situated, he slides one out of the still-full pack. His fingers move to pinch it in half, but he pauses before he does, looks me over somewhat grimly, then gives me the whole thing. 

I must really look like shit.

He hands me his cigarette to light mine with, and as I inhale and stare cross-eyed at the joined embers, making sure mine’s lit, I can feel him observing me, cautiously curious. It doesn’t bother me, not right now.

Once the sweet, sweet tang of smoke fills my tired lungs, I let my eyes slide closed, holding it in my chest for as long as I can handle it. I give his cigarette back, then let my hand fall to the sheets, slowly exhaling a cloud of absolute relief.

I can’t even remember the last time I managed to smoke at all, let alone partaking of the finest tobacco the homeland can manage to mass-produce for us soldier boys. My head falls back against a metal bar with a hollow _thunk,_ but the groan I let out has nothing to do with that and everything to do with the tingly clarity sprouting like spring flowers in my aching skull.

“Don’t get used to it,” Marco chuckles, his warm voice clearly amused. “Usually all we can get around here is bottom-shelf Italian army rations. They’re like smoking dried-out highway weeds. Even the Italians can’t stand them.”

“Can’t believe I’m saying this,” I groan, moving the cigarette to the corner of my mouth with my tongue, “But right now, this cigarette is better than sex.”

Marco somehow snorts and clears his throat all at once, shifting awkwardly on his stool. I wonder if he’s the prudish type. Not that I care.

Taking my cigarette between my fingers, I tilt my head back and exhale another lazy cloud toward the ceiling, freely savoring the taste and the smell and the gentle rush that comes with it. I know I’m smiling, probably looking dopey as all hell, but right now, I do not care. The world is me and this Lucky. I could _marry_ this damn thing.

“Certainly looks like it,” Marco mutters finally, scooting his creaky stool back over to his desk as he does. If not prudish, then definitely bashful. 

Some small part of me takes this brief moment of peace to remind me that I still have far too many problems to just be kicking back like this. I should be asking Marco a dozen questions while he’s here and while I’m awake, poking around to see how much he does or doesn’t know about what lives in the dark. I should be trying to figure out what the fuck is happening to me, to the world outside these cold walls. Trying to figure out if any of this is even real.

Right now, though... right now, smooth, milky smoke rises in vines from my dry lips and curls out of my nose, and that is the simplest joy a man at war can possibly hope to hold. So, for the sake of whatever sanity I have left, if any, I let myself just _exist_ for a while. Shit, I’ve earned it. Have to take my R &R where it comes. 

It’s not like any breath I take comes with the promise that I’ll ever draw in another.

I smoke quietly and watch Marco shuffle through his papers, scribbling notes on a few and crossing out some others, puffs of smoke curling around his flushed ears from time to time. He seems incredibly disorganized, based on how frequently he has to crawl under his desk to find a paper he apparently needs, but I suppose I can’t blame him for trying to keep track of shit. It’s more than the overworked nurses at aid stations can do.

Then again, as far as I know, Marco only has one patient, so he’s probably got the time.

He smokes his cigarette until he absolutely can’t anymore, right up until the embers threaten to burn his lips, before he sighs mournfully and drops the roach into an urn beside his desk. As he turns back to his paperwork, muttering under his breath, I can’t help but notice that the way he works, the way he moves, the way he talks to himself all seem like the mannerisms of someone who’s used to existing in complete, unmonitored solitude. Like he really hasn’t had a conscious patient in a good long while.

Marco looks... excruciatingly lonely. 

Also possibly a little insane, but that’s probably to be expected after being imprisoned in a stone vault and forced to play nurse to half-dead men who can’t or won’t speak to him.

I ash my cigarette over the edge of my bed and close my eyes, trying not to think. Morphine makes that pretty easy.

\--

“Hey, Marco,” I sigh a long while later, after a few hours spent in and out of sleep, half-observing Marco and half-ignoring him. He blinks over at me, his stubby pencil sticking out of his teeth, bangs stuck straight up from running his hands through them. I try not to laugh at the picture he makes like that.

“Yes?”

My gaze falls to where the sheets twist between my fingers, to where the filthy metal of my shackles has left dirt smears down my wrists. “How do I know I can trust you?”

He hums softly, turning to face me again. “Ask me if you can trust me.”

I look up at him, at his carefully neutral expression, and mumble, “Can I trust you?”

His response is immediate. “Probably not.”

My brow furrows. He sucks on his lips for a moment, idly playing with his chewed-down thumbnail, before he sighs and wheels himself over to my bedside. 

“I can’t make you any promises, Jean,” he mumbles, furtively meeting my gaze after a moment. “And I don’t want to try. You don’t really know anything about me or this place, or the people I work for. So no, you probably can’t trust me.” He purses his lips then, fiddling with a little hole in my sheet, refusing to meet my scrutinizing stare. “I really... I would like for you to be able to trust me. I would. But under these circumstances...” His voice trails off, his eyes carefully glued to the hole in the sheet. I wait for him to continue, but he doesn’t, instead letting that unfinished thought filter out into nothingness with a lopsided shrug. 

I can’t really think of a more honest response than that.

“Marco, do you wanna get out of this place?” He’s obviously confused, blinking widely at me, so I clarify. “I mean, you do, right? You wanna get out of here and go back home to New York?”

His gaze falls to the ground between his knees as a frown line darkens between his eyebrows, his teeth digging into his lip. I’d figured him for a more immediate ‘yes,’ but clearly he’s not as easy to read as I thought. After a long moment, he gives a tiny nod, still frowning. Good enough.

“Fine,” I sigh, leaning back against the headboard and closing my eyes. I can feel him staring at me. “If I can trust you, then I’m gonna figure out a way to get us out of here.”

He mulls that over for a moment, then quietly asks, “And if you can’t?”

I shrug lazily. “If I can’t, feel free to tell your evil overlords that I’m planning to bust out of here. Ain’t shit they can do to stop me.”

After a stunned moment, Marco breathes a soft laugh, although the sound seems like it’s stretched thin over a pained sob.

We don’t talk any more after that, and soon enough, I drift off again, exhausted even by that brief exchange. 

Once again, I sleep dreamlessly, which is about as close to peace as I can really hope to get.

\--

A lot of very sudden, very loud noise drags me out of my fog, forcing me to at least squint at my surroundings, even if that’s about all I can manage at first. 

Marco looks harried, his hair on end again, his hands twisting anxiously, and he’s fluttering around a pair of unnervingly enormous men hauling in what looks and smells a whole lot like a pile of fresh, dripping carrion. My stomach turns at the sight, then again as the sharp metal tang of blood reaches my nose and curdles the air around me, leaving my guts tying themselves in empty knots. 

It seems that Marco not only speaks German, as I’d suspected, he speaks it _well,_ based on the speed with which he’s grilling the men. _“What am I supposed to do with him?”_ he pleads, trying and failing to hold their attention. _“He isn’t even breathing! Why bring him to me? What will I do?”_

One of the giants finally turns to him, and as tall as Marco is, this fellow looms over him enough to dwarf him completely. He recoils slightly, but stares up at the man nonetheless, lips pressed into a thin line. 

_“Fix him,”_ the man replies simply, his own gravelly German stunted, unrefined. 

_“Yes, but—”_

The other man, having finished arraying the—the _pieces_ on the bed across from me, comes to loom over Marco too, and I can see the blood drain from his face even from over here.

 _“You fix him,”_ the second man says, his intonation identically monotonous to the other.

Marco swallows heavily, his gaze shifting quickly from the giants to the meat pile and back, before he gives a tiny nod and sputters, _“I-I’ll try.”_

Seemingly satisfied, the twin Goliaths lumber away again without another word. They both bend to fit under the tall stone archway as they go, and their heavy footsteps echo far down the dark hallway until finally a door closes what sounds like miles away. It’s only then that Marco lets out a loud, carefully-held breath, then digs his hands into his hair and turns to regard the mess across from me, muttering, “ _It’s the wrong room, anyway..._ ” under his breath, as if afraid they might somehow hear him.

I figure it’s probably not a good time to startle him, so I rattle my chains gently before I lean up onto my elbows and mumble, “Tough customers, huh.”

“Extremely,” he sighs, scrubbing his hands down his face. After a moment, he turns and walks over to his desk, shaking two whole cigarettes out of the dwindling pack of Luckies and sliding them both between his lips. I quirk an eyebrow at him as he strikes a match and lights them both at once, but it makes more sense when he crosses to me after shaking out the match and hands me one of the cigarettes.

“What the fuck were those guys? Mountain trolls?” I ask after a minute, glancing at him out of the corner of my eye. Marco shakes his head and ashes his cigarette, and when he doesn’t respond, I don’t push it. We smoke in quiet solidarity, Marco leaning heavily against the wall, both of us staring at the bloody, dripping pile of limbs.

“I just cleaned that spot, too,” he mumbles eventually, his dry words coming out wreathed in smoke. I snort in response.

I’m not gonna ask what happened. I don’t really want to know.

It’s far from the worst thing I’ve ever seen, anyway.

When Marco finishes his cigarette, he exhales slowly and drops the roach on the floor, grinding it out under his heel, looking for all the world like he’d rather be anywhere else. I blink up at him, blowing smoke out through my nose, then turn back and point at what remains of a boot hanging off the edge of the bed.

“You know, I don’t think that foot goes with this body. You’d better send it back.”

He stares at me for a second, then back up at the boot.

I haven’t ever heard Marco laugh like that, not once in the brief time I’ve known him, but the sound fills my hollow chest and brings a wide grin to my face. It’s a laugh that suits him, loud and lively, so much better than all his other laughs, ones that all seem to cast pained shadows in their wakes.

It’s a grisly joke, gruesome and inhumane, but that guy’s dead, and those of us still standing have to laugh. We _have_ to.

We all learned that lesson pretty damn fast once we hit the front lines.

If we don’t laugh, we die.

\--

The fresh stench of blood brings the nightmares back.

I stand in the cellar for hours at a time, just _waiting,_ shivering and choking on the blood-thick air, drenched in the stale reek of kerosene, and every time those three sharp knocks ring through the musty abyss, fear rushes over me like ice, and then I wake up.

If Marco notices my cold sweat or my startled whimpers, he doesn’t say anything about it. 

This time, it’s darker than usual, too dark to see the burned furniture, too dark to even see my own hand in front of my face. It’s _cold,_ too, the chill leaving me shivering and exhausted, clutching my own elbows in an attempt to not fucking freeze to death.

This time, the hall light turns on with a distant _click,_ and red, red, violent red cuts like a razor through the blackness, leaving my stomach tying itself in endless knots, every hair on my shaking body standing on end, terrified sweat dripping and soaking through my thin nightclothes.

This time, when those three knocks come, they cut through the silence not as bony young knuckles on dense wood, but as _deafening_ mortar blasts, as if one of those monstrous, hulking giants was standing on the other side, ramming his fist into the door with all his might. The door rattles and slams against the unyielding doorframe, the wood stuck tight from disuse, and that sound, that _sound_ fucking consumes me, ripping horrified shrieks from my twisted stomach, and even slamming my hands over my ears doesn’t save me from the cacophonous thunder shearing holes through my feeble resolve.

Crouched on the icy floor, clutching my ears and sobbing mutely, I squeeze my eyes shut and pray, pray, pray.

Every part of me shakes and rattles in the hollow wake of that awful racket, sweat _pouring_ down my face, dripping from the tip of my nose, pooling and sticking between my palms and my ears.

I curl into myself further, even though the musty air has settled into silence once more. 

Maybe if I fold myself up small enough, I’ll just disappear.

I don’t look back up at the red light flaring from beneath the door, but I don’t have to to know that no matter how enormous that sound, the shadows cast by the person standing on the other side are still the same tiny, delicate shadows as always.

\--

I’m only crying a little when I awake with a jolt, heart slamming around in my ribs, my chains loud in the relative quiet. Groaning softly, I let my head fall back onto my thin pillow, squeezing my eyes shut so I can focus on getting myself together.

There’s nothing here. Nothing lives in these shadows. No faces in the dark.

At least, not that I’ve seen.

There’s a soft, metallic clicking from somewhere beside me, I realize after a moment. Leaning up again, I scuttle away from the sound as best my chains will allow, prepared for the worst, but it’s just Marco.

He blinks up at me from where he’s sitting on the floor beside his desk, a battered-looking old record player resting between his bent knees, the sort that needs to be wound up in order to play. Thing must be older than I am. Its wide metal horn is in pretty bad shape, bent in and half flattened onto itself, like a damn house fell on it or something. 

For a moment, Marco watches me pant and sweat, before he gives me a small, sympathetic smile and uses the wall to pull himself to his feet, brushing dirt off his pants.

“I think today must be Christmas,” he tells me cheerfully. He steps over the record player, leaning over to snag the pack of Luckies off his desk as he does, then pulls one out and tears it in half. Hopefully to share with me. I could sure as shit use it. “Someone brought this for me from a little village the Jerries bombed out last week, said I’m allowed to have it if I can fix it.”

I take the lit half smoke he hands me, more than a little grateful for it, and for the distraction from the state I’d woken up in. “And can you?”

“I guess we’ll find out, won’t we,” he hums, turning to look down at it. “How bad can it be?”

Snorting loudly, I press my fist to my lips in a vague imitation of the flattened bell, then blow shrill trumpet noises into it. It makes a sound roughly akin to a cat that’s been sat on. He laughs at that, tossing me a wide grin, before he turns to face me again. “How are you feeling?”

“Ugh.” I flop back against my bed, tossing an arm over my eyes. He takes the hint, and mercifully doesn’t ask me any other questions. Maybe he has nightmares too. I can only assume we all do. 

Something occurs to me. I peer up at him from under my elbow, taking a drag off my cigarette, before I ask, “Do you really think it’s Christmas?”

Marco shrugs, looking sheepishly at the floor as he exhales smoke. “Can’t say one way or another.”

“Lord, man,” I grumble, “When was the last time those bastards let you see _daylight?”_

For whatever reason, he stiffens at that, turning his face away from me and rubbing the back of his neck. They must keep him seriously locked down. That’s no way for a man to live. I have half a mind to tell him as such, too, but I’m sure he knows that far better than I do.

“Well, it was early February when I, um.” I swallow heavily, glancing down at the ashes hanging off my cigarette. “Last time I checked.”

He pauses for a moment, still looking at the wall, before he quietly asks, “The year?”

Good Lord.

“1944.”

Marco hums, taking a deep pull off his cigarette. His fingers are trembling.

I clear my throat, then shuffle onto my side, my head propped up in my hand. My chains have a lot to say about it, and the sound draws Marco’s attention, his dark eyes wide and somewhat watery.

For both our sakes, I change the subject. “So what’re you gonna do about that horn?”

“Oh, um.” Marco stands up straight again, clearing his own throat. “I don’t quite know. A hammer, maybe?”

“A hammer,” I repeat with a snicker.

“Well, Dr. Phonograph,” Marco laughs, turning to face me again with a crooked smile. “What would you suggest?” He raises his eyebrows in challenge, arms crossed over his chest. Touché. Raising my hands in surrender, I let him get in his chuckles, and he teases, “I thought as much.”

“You even got any records for that thing?”

He beams at me and nods. “I do! Just one. One of the men brought it to me ages ago. Had no idea what to make of it, of course, but he brought it back so I could tell him what it was. I’ve been keeping my fingers crossed for a victrola ever since. We never could afford one back home.”

My brow furrows. “Wait, your man didn’t know what a _record_ is?”

Marco shakes his head, finishing off his cigarette and casually flicking it into the urn beside his desk. I guess it takes him a tick to realize how fucking absurd that sounds, because he turns to stare at me after a second and stammers, “U-uh, I guess he came from one of those little backwaters or something.”

I squint at him, and he smiles and fidgets.

“Anyway,” he blurts after an awkward pause, “I’m not entirely sure what the record is, exactly. I hope it’s something good.” He steps back over the record player and sits down behind it again, tilting it up and intently investigating the turntable, presumably so he doesn’t have to endure my growing confusion. 

Once again, I let it go. One unknown man’s lack of wit isn’t interesting enough for me to dwell on. Instead, I work on getting comfortable on my stiff, squeaky bed, kicking the sheet down toward the end because it’s still somewhat damp with sweat. Not like my shorts are doing much better, nor any other part of me. Sure wish I knew where my pants went.

My head still propped up in one hand, I finish my smoke and crush it out between my fingers over the edge of the bed, which doesn’t seem to bother Marco in the least. I set to watching him try to figure out how to pull up the turntable, doing my best to be helpful from over here, not that I know shit about record players. I’m just bored.

I don’t know what Marco expects to do with that thing, honestly. The more I look at it, the more it looks like matchsticks. The wood casing has a big, splintered crack running up the front, and there’s a pretty good chunk missing from one of the singed corners. Now that I look at it, the winding arm seems to be sitting at a strange angle, too. It definitely looks like the sort of thing that would come out of an air raid. Who knows what’s going on inside the damn thing, or if it even works.

Still, Marco seems optimistic, humming to himself as he pokes around the gears or whatever the hell’s in there. It’s certainly an improvement over the face he made when he had to ask me what year it is.

\--

It’s one of those times where I’m lucky enough to sleep dreamlessly, knowing nothing but cherished peace for a while, when the faint sound of someone crying cuts through the fog.

I expect to wake up in my cellar again, but when I open my bleary eyes, I just see Marco’s unoccupied desk.

There’s a paper hanging off the edge of the desk that wasn’t there when I went to sleep, held up only by Marco’s canteen resting on the corner. I squint at it, trying to figure it out without really understanding why, but all I can make out is a thick black circle scrawled across the page, surrounded in tiny scribbles and filled with odd shapes and lines. Something about it makes me uneasy, but hell if I know what.

The soft crying draws my attention again, muffled sobs and wet sniffs coming from behind me, so I cautiously, quietly turn my head to investigate.

Marco’s slouched next to a bed several down from me, his back to me, head bowed. The bed is occupied, surprisingly. Unsurprisingly, the occupant is rather dead, albeit thankfully in one piece this time. The corpse’s face is turned enough that I can see the glassy sheen to its lidded eyes, as well as the enormous, blackened char covering some of its face and, I assume, most of the rest of its head. It _reeks,_ too, like burning flesh and something worse than that, something I can’t quite place.

“I-I’m sorry,” Marco whispers between sniffs, his voice cracked and shaking. “I’m sorry, I’m s-so sorry...”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Marco cry.

I have, however, heard him apologize. The first words I ever heard him say were a stuttered apology, one he whispered to my dying body by name, as raw and honest as if he’d done something to me.

Holding my breath, I stare at his tense, quaking shoulders, listening intently as he tries to breathe around his bitten-back sobs. He reaches up and grips the dead man’s burned uniform in shaking hands, the stiff, crackling fabric loud between his fingers. “I-I’m—I kn-know it’s not f-f-fair—b-but I _can’t,_ I’m s-so sorry,” he breathes, and I want so badly to tell him to stop fucking apologizing for things that aren’t his fault, to stop apologizing just for _existing,_ but I don’t know that he wants me to see him like this, so I just keep quiet.

He takes a deep, shuddering breath, then chokes on it, before he leans further forward and, for whatever reason, rests his forehead on the dead man’s stomach. I cannot for the life of me imagine why.

I have to wonder how well I really know Marco. If at all.

Stooped forward over the body, his sobs now are heavily muffled, as if he’s gripping the corpse’s uniform in his teeth. 

I don’t know why, but my skin fucking _crawls._

Swallowing quietly, I turn away again, leaving Marco with his grief as silently as I possibly can. It seems for a moment that he holds his breath as my hair shifts across the pillow, as if he’d somehow heard that faint, faint whisper of motion. It’s impossible, I know, but I still try to steady my breath into that of someone fast asleep, just in case.

The thought passes as quickly as it comes, so I must’ve just imagined it, my tired senses on edge enough to fool me.

I stare at that strange, illegible drawing hanging off the desk instead, trying not to listen to Marco’s tears, until eventually I’m left with perfect, vacant silence once more.


	3. Loose Chains

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I don't understand anything that's happening to me anymore, nor what I'm becoming. I don't know what to do or where to hide, and worse, I think Marco's just as lost as I am.
> 
> **I.**
> 
> _February 1944. Allied forces fight their way north through German-occupied Italy toward Rome, hoping to wrest control of the peninsula from Hitler in what would become the costliest Western campaign in the course of the Second World War._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have a [tumblr](http://avoidingavoidance.tumblr.com)
> 
> a note: i take no credit for the quote marco recites early on, it is reportedly an old italian saying from the early 1900s

The next time I see Marco, I decide not to bring up what I’d seen. I figure if he really wants me to know why he’d been crying and apologizing over a charred corpse, he’ll tell me. Instead, when he comes to drain some more of my blood for some doctorly purpose or another, I observe him quietly for a while, torn between talking about my unbroken arm and talking about nothing. 

Eventually, I err on the side of nothing, same as I always have. It’s easiest.

“What’s New York like?” I mumble into the comfortable silence, drawing his gaze away from the relaxed crook of my good elbow, where ancient, murky rubber tubing leads blood from the hollow needle in my skin to a small glass jar.

“You’ve never been there?” he asks in return, a crooked smile curling the corner of his lips. As he pulls the needle out of my arm, I wrinkle my nose at the sensation, then shake my head. He chuckles softly, sitting up straight and pressing a scrap of bandage or sheet or something over where the needle had been. “Well, that’s a big question, then. I lived there most of my life, so I was used to it, but I’m sure Manhattan sounds much better from everywhere else.”

I raise an eyebrow at him. Sure enough, I’ve only ever heard about the glamor of it all. Well, glamor and seemingly endless sensational tales of guns and gangsters and murder. “How bad can it be?”

Marco snorts at me and shakes his head, setting the blood jar on his cluttered instrument tray before he crosses his legs and hums thoughtfully. “For rich folk, it’s probably a grand old time,” he says finally, idly rubbing his palm against his cheek. “I worked at a big factory before the war, same as a lot of people who lived in the tenements, and there was an old Italian fella there who described it real well. How did he say...” He hums again, then snaps his fingers before he squints dramatically and continues in a truly absurd impression of an Italian accent, hand motions and all. “‘I came to America because I heard the streets were paved with gold. When I got here, I found out three things: first, the streets weren’t paved with gold. Second, they weren’t paved at all. And third, I was expected to pave them.’”

As I’m staring incredulously, Marco’s sunny grin spreads across his face again, and his teeth catch his lower lip. Despite myself, I laugh at him, both at his overwrought Italian-guy face and at how damn _pleased_ he looks with himself for pulling it off. “Paved with gold, huh,” I snicker, dragging one hand down my face.

“That’s what they say in other places,” he says as he stands up and grabs the jar. “It’s what my mother told me, too, before we left Cuba.”

I look up at him, folding one arm behind my head. “Why’d you leave? ‘S wrong with Cuba?”

Marco sighs softly, pursing his lips and staring down at my blood as he swirls it idly. Finally, he seems to come to a conclusion, and he throws me a dry smile before he says, “We thought the streets in America were paved with gold.” He pauses again, averting his eyes. “Or we thought my father would make it so.”

“But he didn’t?”

He shrugs tensely, still swirling the jar, stirring up a slow whirlpool in my thick blood. “A dream within a dream, I suppose. No matter now.” He smiles up at me then, an unspoken apology hidden in the curve of his lips. “I have to go put this blood to work, or else it’ll turn to molasses and I’ll just have to draw more.”

I wrinkle my nose again. Marco’s needle is a long way past dull, I think. It’d hurt like hell when he stuck me the first time. I’m not itching for a second round. “No thanks.” 

His smile widens, and then he leaves, the quick tap of his footsteps echoing away down the hall.

Slumping down further against the bars of the headboard, I fiddle with the sheet covering me and think about Marco, and about New York, the enormous, oblivious emperor robed in nothing but air, proclaiming himself to be dressed in the finest golden silk the world has to offer.

\--

“Say, Jean,” Marco murmurs from his desk, nimbly twirling a thin screwdriver between practiced fingers. “Can I bend your ear a little?” I glance over at him, but he’s staring down at the screwdriver, so all I can see is his shaded profile, half of his face drawn into a distracted frown.

“Sure?”

He blinks slowly and purses his lips, clearly hesitant.

“What were you before all this?” he asks finally, still flawlessly spinning the screwdriver.

“Before the war?” He nods, and I shrug even though he’s not looking. “College boy. Barely.”

That gets his attention. He sets the screwdriver down on an open book as he looks up at me, his wide eyes curious. “Really? College?”

I nod, lazily lacing my fingers behind my head. “Yeah. Dropped out and volunteered right after those bastards hit Pearl Harbor.” 

“Pearl Harbor...” Marco repeats softly, like he’s never heard of it or something. There’s no way he doesn’t know about Pearl Harbor, though. No matter how many people knew of it before, I bet every living soul under God knew its name the day Japan attacked us. America makes a lot of noise on its own, but America at war is a roar fit to deafen the entire world.

Marco hums, then turns toward me properly, his expression still keenly interested. “What do they teach you there? At college?”

I raise my eyebrows at him. “Anything you like, I reckon.”

 _“Anything?”_

“Yeah, probably,” I laugh, straightening up more so we can talk. “Don’t they have colleges in New York?”

Marco sniffs and turns away again, reaching over to the corner of his desk to grab his pack of smokes. We’d run out of Luckies a while ago, and he hadn’t been lying when he said Italian army ration smokes taste like fucking gutter weeds. Still, when he rips one in half and lights them both on one match, I take the stub he offers me without complaint.

Once he’s wheeled himself over, Marco leans back against the wall beside me and investigates the burning embers on his cigarette as he says, “New York’s got school, sure.” He pauses again, taking a long drag. “College is for white kids whose families have money, though.”

I try not to think about the nice things my mother had to sell to send me to school, nor about how upset she’d been when I dropped out anyway. Fucking waste.

“Besides,” Marco sighs, interrupting my wandering thoughts. “I hear you can only go to college if you finish high school, right?” I exhale a cloud of smoke, then nod, and he gives me a wry smile as he says, “Proud third grade graduate, myself.”

Marco laughs at the obvious confusion that twists my face. “Third grade?”

“Yessir,” he replies, casually kicking his heels up onto the side of my bed. “My English wasn’t too good back then, but it didn’t need to be in the factory, and my family needed the help. Got tired of watching my mother and her husband work themselves to the bone to keep us alive.” 

“So you quit after third grade to work at a _factory_?” Marco nods, then leans his head back against the wall, his smoke hanging from the corner of his lips. “How’d you get away with that? Don’t they send guys after kids who skip?”

He squints at that, humming thoughtfully, before he shrugs and blows smoke out of his nose. “I doubt it. Not for the tenement kids, anyway. No one ever bothered much for us but to make sure we weren’t pickin’ their pockets.”

I try to picture that. Little Marco, ten years old, his round, freckled face and his baby hands all smudged with factory dirt. Little Marco, invisible to wealthy folk until he wandered a little too close to a pocket. It leaves a bad fucking taste in my mouth, that kind of selfish, ugly disregard for other people. Especially children. Children with jobs.

Some part of me wants to apologize to Marco, but I don’t know what for. It’s not like I can apologize for someone else’s bullshit.

I’d always hated being around adults as a child, all those nosy old people at church flapping around and telling me what to do, what I should make of myself. I always thought being ignored altogether would be better, until people actually started ignoring me. Can’t even begin to imagine how Marco might’ve felt.

“They really teach you anything at college, huh?” Marco murmurs, once again pulling me out of my head, idly flicking ash off his cigarette. “What’d you learn?”

“Nothin’,” I lie, my frown deepening. “Only stayed a year and some.”

“I see.” There’s an awkward pause while he scrutinizes my bad lie, and while I squirm under his scrutiny. Finally, he asks, “Did you like it?”

My eyes shutter closed for a second, the twinkle of afternoon sunlight on the dust motes hanging between towering bookshelves barely a hazy memory now, but I shake it off and give him another lopsided shrug. “It was fine enough while I was there.” He hums again, then takes a long pull off his smoke, mercifully redirecting his gaze to the smudgy wall across from us. 

I get the feeling that he’s not going to squeeze me about it, but something still itches on the tip of my tongue, a half-formed thought or a worn out excuse. I bite down on it, and it retaliates by sharply reminding me that it’s still healing from when I damn near bit it off at Monte Cassino.

There’s not much blood this time, but I groan anyway and lean away from Marco, spitting the copper taste into the bucket between me and the next bed.

“You alright?” he asks, sitting up straight so he can look me over.

“Yeah, yeah, just bit my damn tongue.” I slump back against the iron bars with a sigh, ignoring the sore twinge from my ribs.

“Here, let me see.” 

I snort at him, then stick out my tongue for half a second only. Somehow, it’s enough to satisfy him, and he rolls his eyes and relaxes against the wall again.

My stupid tongue’s still itching, though, and now that I’ve started, I can’t stop thinking about dozy days spent hidden away in the school’s library.

When the tiresome taste of words unsaid gets annoying, I huff smoke and mumble, “English.”

He blinks up at me, tilting his head in question. “English?”

“Yeah. English.” I shrug that off too, and my chains clank loudly as I rub the back of my neck. “Studied English while I was at college.”

“How’s that? You studied books?”

“Something like that.” This is usually the point where people get bored, or where something explodes nearby and derails the conversation. It’s quiet here, though, so unless Marco’s lost interest—

“Ah, I’d love that,” he sighs, a warm, genuine smile sneaking across his face. I stare at him, entirely at a loss for words. “I do like reading,” he continues softly, “But never had much time for it when I was young. I put just about all the time I had into the factory. Then the Jerries came looking for trouble, so I put all my time into giving ‘em hell.”

I nod firmly at that. “Damn right.”

Marco smokes the last of his cigarette that he can manage, right up until the embers threaten to burn his fingers, then crushes out the remains over the urn next to his desk. “I found time to read after, though.”

“After what?” I finish my smoke as I ask, and as casual as the question had been, the way he stiffens for a second makes it a lot less casual.

“Oh, uh,” he splutters, scratching the back of his head. Marco might be the worst liar I’ve ever seen. “After they took me prisoner.” He pauses, then seems satisfied with that, leaning back against the wall again and giving me a disarming smile. “Once they figured out I wasn’t what they needed, they put me to work as an aid station medic. I think their old doc had just eaten a grenade or something. Lucky me.”

Ugh. I pull a face at the idea, and Marco chuckles warmly, lazily folding his arms over his chest.

He doesn’t elaborate, so I make myself more comfortable, bending one bare knee up out of my sheet. My whole leg’s an interesting array of dirt and blotchy bruises in just about every unpleasant color there is. I turn to look at him instead, clanking my chains pointedly. “Aid station, huh? That what they call this?”

With a pained smile, Marco shrugs and replies, “Or something.”

“Well, it’s a sight better than most aid stations off the front line,” I grumble. “Quieter, too. No screaming.”

“Depends on the day,” he assures me, his expression grim. Shit, I don’t doubt it, not with the condition the other guys seem to turn up in.

Now that I think of it, I have no idea how long I’ve been here, but it’s been maddeningly quiet the whole time. I told Marco to save his morphine a few visits ago, so I’ve been sleeping a lot less. Less sleep means more time spent trying to ignore the way my ears ring in the pulsing silence, among other things.

“Say, Marco,” I say, meeting his eye again. “I never hear bombs or nothing.” He screws his lips to one side, but doesn’t respond, so I continue, “We gotta be far from the lines if they’re not bombin’, right? Where the hell are we?”

Marco’s eyes wander as he hums contemplatively, tapping one finger against his elbow. I’m pretty sure that’s his thinking face. “I’m not... entirely sure,” he says after a few seconds, and the way he squints at the ceiling leads me to believe him. “They just kind of threw me down here and told me to get to work. There was plenty of bombing at first, but I guess whoever it was moved on.”

“How long ago was that?”

He stares at me, then looks over his shoulder at his disastrously messy desk.

A while, then. A long while.

“Ah,” I say simply, at which he smiles crookedly.

“So,” he chirps, “English, huh?” I let him change the subject, instead lacing my fingers over my stomach and nodding. “Just English?”

“That’s all I got.” This lie leaves bitter acid in my throat. 

“You pick up German just from smacking Jerries around?”

“Sure did.” Another lie. The acid burns. I take a deep breath and, maybe a little too loudly, say, “What about you, huh? You takin’ lessons from your troll pals?”

Marco shudders at that, then firmly shakes his head. “Like fun I am,” he huffs. I can’t help but snicker at the face he’s making. “I did pick it up around here, though. Bit by bit, and some other things, too. Whatever’s useful.”

I remember how fluidly he’d spoken to the aforementioned trolls, then raise an eyebrow at him. He must be some kind of genius, picking up that kind of skill that fast. Shit, the first American boots to dig into European soil belonged to my division, and we didn’t even touch Sicily until July.

July of 1943.

With that thought, I dimly realize that I’ve only been in Italy for all of six months.

It feels like a fucking lifetime. An awful, smoking crater of a lifetime. Everything I was, the man I used to be, the man I wanted to become... all that’s left of any of that is a pile of withered ashes filling out some rusty shackles. A husk. A charred desk hidden away in the corner of an unused cellar, left to rot with the rest of the Kirschtein family name.

I can’t remember what we were talking about.

I’ve been doing this a lot lately, I think. Over the last few days, or what feels like days, anyway. I get lost in the quiet and drift away from myself, and my thoughts wander aimlessly through vacant nothingness until they stumble upon some old memory like a stair. That stair leads to another stair, then another, and then I always end up right back in my family’s cellar. 

At least when I’m awake, I can run away from the stink of arson.

With a deep, shaky breath, I drag my hand through the cold sweat on my brow and try to clear my head. Gotta change the subject. What were we talking about? Try to remember...

“What sort of work they give you, studying English?” Marco asks suddenly. I glance over at him, but he’s still contemplating the wall across from us, his posture entirely casual. “You probably read all kinds of strange things.”

“Oh, yeah,” I mumble, silently grateful for the nudge. “Reading books, writing essays and shit. Talking about what they mean.”

“What d’you do after that?”

“Dunno. Enlisted before I got to that part.” I stare intently at a small burn hole in my sheet, carefully picking at the singed threads around the edges. “My ma just wanted me to get all smart. Get an education. Said it’d help me be a better husband or something.” He hums quietly, but doesn’t ask if I have a wife back home. I guess my empty ring finger speaks to that. “I reckon she wanted me to study something with money in it, medicine or science,” I sigh, self-consciously lacing my fingers over the nape of my neck.

Marco turns to me, smiling warmly as he asks, “But you chose books?”

“Guess so.” I purse my lips and stare at my colorfully bruised knee, then mutter, “I dunno. Before the war, I had designs on being a writer or some stupid shit like that.”

“That’s not stupid,” Marco chides, knocking the toe of his boot lightly against my foot. “Wanting to be something isn’t stupid. What’s stupid is that you’re chained to a bed in your drawers, talkin’ to me instead of sitting in some big swanky office with a pen in your hand.”

I snort loudly and knock my foot back against his, closing my eyes comfortably. “Shaddap.”

“I’m serious!” Marco sits up and turns to face me properly, leaning forward against the edge of my bed. “Books touch people’s lives, Jean, even people who can’t read.” I blink up at him, and he nods proudly, a fond smile curling his lips. “I used to read to my mother before we slept. No matter how bushed the two of us were, I’d do my best to read her a few pages every night.” He pauses, then sucks on his lips and drops his gaze to the sheets. “Even though we only had two or three books. I stretched them out. Read them over again. A few pages every single night.”

I don’t really know what tenements look like inside, but an image comes to mind anyway of little Marco sitting by his mother’s bedside, or at her feet while she brushes her hair, some absurdly large book spread open on his lap, a concentrated frown creasing his face. She might smile and nod, or let her narrow fingers drift through his dark hair, or anything else my mother used to do when I’d read for her as a child.

“Sounds nice,” I mumble after a moment, blinking the thought away.

“It was,” he sighs. “It was just about the only time we had together, too. She left for her jobs so early and came back so late, especially after her husband passed.”

My eyebrows shoot up. “Your old man?”

“No, no,” he replies quickly, waving the thought away. “I have two little brothers, he’s their father. A nice Guatemalan fella my mother met at one of her jobs. He died of consumption before the war.”

Consumption... I know vaguely that the word refers to some terrible illness or another, but I haven’t heard it since I was very young, and never from someone around my age. I wonder if everyone in New York talks like old men.

Before I can ask, Marco sits up and gives me a cheerful nod. “Anyway, there you have it. Wanting to be a writer isn’t stupid. As long as you have stories to tell, there’ll be someone to read them, so that makes it worth it.”

The way he’s beaming at me right now, his dark skin lit all warm in the torchlight, his teeth catching the corner of his lip as his hopeful smile widens further, easily breaks through my sour stubbornness. I’m not so sure I believe it, but I let him win this one anyway, giving him a snort and a noncommittal shrug instead.

When I was young, my father would scold me, insisting that I stop telling all the tall tales I used to. Said they were childish at best, and at worst they’d get me in trouble someday. Said I’d just end up all dead like the boy who cried wolf.

I don’t want to talk about that man, so I let Marco believe that he persuaded me, and the wide, soothing smile he spares me is a thousand times more comforting than the inevitable alternative.

\--

It only occurs to me much later that I should’ve asked Marco what _he_ wants to do when all this is over. Not just to be polite, either. I really want to know. I don’t know why, but I do. That curiosity comes in fragments during a fitful slumber, when I’m falling in and out of sleep in sharp, anxious jerks, tossing and turning and tangling my restraints. 

Then, somewhere in the hazy delirium between dreams and this very loose definition of reality, I hear music.

The now-familiar sounds of a piano drift like ghosts down the hallway, twining together to form the same tune I’ve heard in my sleep several times now. The same sad, sweet song, those unknown words slipping through the cracks in my thinly-stretched dreams like sunlight.

As the melody soothes my restless soul, I push my cheek against the bed and take a few rattling breaths, and once my heart has settled and the cold sweat beading on my brow has dried, I finally realize that the person singing is Marco.

After all this is over, when the war is done and we’ve escaped this place and found our way home again, I reckon Marco would make a damn fine pianist.

In my dreams, Marco’s gentle voice flows like smoke from his lips into his cupped palms, and his ink-stained fingers lovingly shape his song into delicate glass bells.

\--

“You know,” I grumble sometime later, “I ain’t a doctor, but aren’t you supposed to keep your patients _clean_ or something?”

Marco looks up at me from his record player, then grins widely, setting down the narrow metal pins he’d been poking into the exposed motor. “I figured you’d be used to being dirty.”

I snort, rolling my eyes at him as loudly as I can. “Sure, but out on the lines I got a lot more to think about besides what’s growin’ in my armpits.” He snickers, wrinkling his nose, but he _must_ see my point. Or rather, smell it. “Y’all don’t have shit to keep a guy busy down here, far as I can tell. Have some mercy.”

He shrugs lightly, but stands anyway and dusts his hands off on his trousers, giving me a quick smile. “I’ll see what I can dig up, sure.”

I watch him leave again, scratching my nails through my scruffy stubble with a grimace. With nothing to occupy my mind or my hands, the foul state of all my bits and pieces has been driving me up a fucking wall. I don’t know how Marco can stand to be around me at all, let alone spending his apparently abundant free time less than ten feet away from me. 

We spend a lot of time together, it feels like. A lot of time not talking, or talking about nothing at all. I like the company, and I think he does too, even with all my sharp edges.

At some point, I’m going to have to ask him about my arm, and about what comes next for me. I have to.

I do not fucking want to.

I don’t even want to know what happened anymore. I just want to get out of here and go the hell home. I want to sail back stateside and drive up the dusty dirt road to my family’s farm, to the little white house atop a little dirt hill, the tiniest island in a thriving sea of golden wheat, wreathed in the smell of bread and dry Texas summer. I want to hear my mother sing again, hear the clear ring of her voice unshackled from the chaos of bomb blasts and dying men.

Closing my eyes and leaning my head back, I imagine for the millionth time what coming home would be like. My mother’s joyful tears dripping onto her hands where they’re clasped over her heart, the sharp-edged smirk on my sister’s lips, the front door finally repainted a clean, unsullied white. The smell of rabbit stew in the kitchen. The sound of the radio in the sitting room.

The sweet, sweet taste of coming home an American war hero, of redeeming my family’s name.

It’s a well-worn image behind my eyelids. Dog-eared like an old book, smoothed over again and again, shaped and molded until it’s just perfect, just right. Just comforting enough to make up for the heaving earth beneath my feet, the rain of blackened soil flung far from a mortar strike. 

I want to go home so fucking badly.

Music catches my ear again, but not my mother’s. I think it’s Marco humming as he comes back down the hall, his footsteps slower, heavier now, burdened by something. I open my eyes in time to see him come into the room, carrying a wide wooden washbasin. Whatever’s inside is steaming promisingly in the cool air, either boiling hot or close enough.

He pauses when he sees me starting to sit upright, screwing his lips to one side and squinting at my shackles. Thinking face. I shake my leg helpfully, which earns me a soft smile before he sets the basin down and moves back to the doorway. 

Then he tilts his head back, staring up, up, up at something far above his head, but before I think to ask him what the hell he’s doing, he starts speaking smooth, smart-sounding Italian at the ceiling.

I don’t know a lick of Italian aside from what comes out of bedrooms, so I have no idea what he’s asking the ceiling for, or why. I’ve never seen the hallway, either. Maybe there’s a balcony or something. All I know is that it’s fucking _dark,_ so dark that the flickering firelight from the torches in here seems to lay down and die right at the vacant doorway, failing even to cast the faintest of light onto the stone floor out there. It’s like the world just stops altogether at the threshold.

Marco’s pleading with the ceiling, smiling coyly and trying to look as agreeable as possible, all while gesturing to his wrists, then to me. 

I hear something then, a distant jingle of keys, and something clicks in my head.

There’s a _guard_ out there. There must be. A guard with the keys to my shackles, and maybe other things too.

I stash that knowledge away for later, when I start planning my escape.

“ _Grazie, Francesco,_ ” Marco sings, clapping his hands over his heart. “ _Mille grazie, amico mio._ ”

He moves to pick up the basin again, and as he does, I hear a whispered reply: “ _Prego, Marco._ ”

It’s not my ears that pick up that low, raspy sound, though.

I’d swear before God that the words came from somewhere deep in the back of my skull, scratching and crawling out from under the edges of my soul.

Just like that, my heart is pounding.

Right as chills flood across my skin, racing up my spine and spilling over the nape of my neck, every torch in the room suddenly flickers and gasps, and the shadows play about the stone archway in a way that almost gives the impression of _claws_ curling around the rounded upper edge. Before I can look too closely, though, Marco starts walking toward me with the basin, humming contently once more.

As if someone had opened a door to the frozen wasteland outside, a sharp, icy wind whips into the room, and in unison, all the torches blow out, leaving my stinging eyes straining in the complete, instant darkness.

I smell smoke.

My chest tightens, and tightens and tightens and tightens until I cannot fucking breathe.

Oblivious to my rising panic, Marco groans in Italian, his tone lightly scolding, and rather than feel soothed by Marco’s complete lack of surprise, the sheer _wrongness_ of his reaction has me shaking in my bed.

This is the same living darkness that lurks in my cursed cellar. The _same_ pitch black, granted unholy motion by some being even darker than this, the twin shade to the one that has always haunted my waking nightmares, and _I am not asleep._

This is real.

My stomach ties itself in knots, but all I can do is quake, pulling my shackled feet as close as the chains will allow.

The air is freezing cold now, numbing my fingers and turning my tears into crystalline frost at the corners of my eyes. If I could see anything in the pitch, I’m sure I would see my breath in frantic clouds. 

This is _wrong._

There’s a loud, metallic jingling near my feet then, and I startle and recoil so harshly that the bed creaks and jolts, but before I can flail any further from the sound, something _yanks_ on the chains restraining my feet, pulling me flat across the sheets.

“ _M-Marco—_ ” I shrill, thrashing uselessly against whatever unseen force is holding me hostage in the dark, and I hear his breath catch at the sound of my fear. That’s all I can hear, and my ears are ringing and my eyes are straining and I’m struggling to get _away,_ away from whatever icy evil is—

Opening my shackles.

“Just be still, Jean,” Marco soothes, like nothing’s fucking _wrong_ here. 

I must be losing my fucking mind. I _have_ to be.

Swallowing heavily, I force myself to stop moving, effectively playing dead, and once whatever it is finishes unlocking my wrists, I curl up into a tiny ball and scrabble back along the bed, my back slamming painfully against the headboard in my attempts to retreat.

Marco starts humming slowly, coming closer now, and I can’t decide if I desperately want him near me or if I desperately want him to get the fuck away.

Beneath the thunder of my hammering pulse, I hear something slithering away across the high ceiling. 

My skin is fucking _crawling._

The cold fades then, and after a few endless seconds, all at once, the torches spring back to life in a shower of violently blinding sparks and a wave of heat. I whip my head around, searching, folding myself tinier and tinier, but nothing moves in the wavering shadows aside from Marco, who’s carefully setting his basin down at the foot of my bed.

I stare over at the archway, wide eyes boring into the vacant blackness, but nothing moves there, either. Not that I can see.

The only sign of movement out there is the faintest sound of jostled keys settling into silence.

I do not know what is real anymore.

Marco says my name then, his voice soft and cautious, before he comes to stand beside me. Even though he’s approaching me as one would approach a scared, wounded animal, I flinch away from him, panting and gasping for air, feebly trying and failing to summon the breath to demand an explanation. He understands, though, and sits gingerly on the edge of my bed, keeping his hands where I can see them as he murmurs, “That happens sometimes. I’m sorry, I forgot to warn you. It’s... just the wind.”

I gape at him. “The _wind?!”_

He nods slowly, his teeth digging into his lip. He looks so worried, so concerned for my pounding heart and my watery stare, but his placating is just scaring me more. 

I heard that—that guard, that _thing_ talk inside my _head._ I wish I could believe it was just the wind.

My breath shudders out in a faint sob.

“The wind does strange things to the torches,” Marco says gently, one hand creeping slowly across the sheets toward me. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you, Jean. I know you don’t like the dark.”

Like a snake, terror twists and coils into hot, shameful anger.

“I’m a grown fucking man, Marco,” I spit, my hands curling into tight, shaking fists in the sheets. “I ain’t afraid of the _dark._ ”

His mouth opens, but he seems to reconsider whatever he’d intended to say, and as he swallows his words he nods and carefully stands. “My mistake.”

“What the _fuck_ was that?” I snarl, bolting up onto my hands and knees and jolting toward him, hackles absolutely bristling. As pathetic as I must look, dirty and scrawny and scared, Marco still takes a hasty step back and swallows audibly, holding his hands up between us. “And don’t you _dare_ lie, you’re fucking awful at it.”

Clearly intimidated, Marco steps back further, his gaze flicking from my face to my undone shackles and back again. “Th-that was Francesco,” he stammers. “He holds the keys and guards the doors. I-I asked him to unchain you so you could wash yourself.” I frown at that, and Marco’s lips draw into a thin line, his nervousness incredibly apparent. “H-he’s not supposed to,” he continues quietly, his mute voice wavering. “But I-I’ve been good to him, so sometimes he bends the rules for me. That’s _all,_ Jean, I swear.”

I crawl forward further, my teeth grinding roughly, my breath still heavy, labored. Marco stiffens, scurrying backward to the end of my bed so the footboard lies between us. Like that’d stop me.

“You’re a bad liar,” I growl, my fingers digging into the sheets again, clenching around them.

“I-I know,” he breathes. “I know I am. I’m _sorry,_ Jean, I really am.” He averts his eyes then, twisting his fingers anxiously. After a tense beat, he whispers, “I _told_ you you couldn’t trust me.”

The hurt in his voice is baldly apparent. Right along with the fear and the stress and the exhaustion I’m so used to hearing in my own.

Something in me unwinds, but not by much.

If Marco wanted to kill me, he’d’ve done it already. He wouldn’t be working to keep me alive, and he wouldn’t spend so much time talking to me.

If Francesco wanted to kill me, he’d’ve done it in the dark, in the icy, smoky gloom that had crushed all light from the world.

Maybe I’m already dead.

Maybe this is hell.

I sit back on my heels, glaring down at the dirty sheets stretched between my shaking fists.

Squeezing my eyes shut, I curl forward until my face is pressed against the bed, until I’ve folded myself up tight, taking up as little space as I possibly can.

My shoulders shake as I force myself to swallow down the tears that want to spill from my tired eyes, down over my filthy, stubbly cheeks.

I want to go _home._

My breath catches in my chest and my eyes burn, and I desperately choke it all down and force myself to remember the dry bread smell of the wheat fields before we had to sell the land. When the golden waves still waved, when there was still money in the world for us to trade wheat for, still people who would look my family in the eyes without contempt. 

When I still knew my mother’s face, her smiles and her frowns and the color of her eyes in the sun before they all crumbled to dust in my mind.

When all I had to fear was the distant memory of a fire I never should have seen or felt.

My breath cracks around a broken sob, and I rock back and forth slightly to calm myself, my hands twisting and twisting in the sheets.

Somewhere above me, Marco whispers, “I’ll try to find some clean clothes for you,” before he pads away from me, moving quickly out of the room and down the hall.

God, I want to go home.

\--

The basin is full of hot water, still steaming slightly, and while it’s soothing in its heat, I can’t fully relax. I doubt I ever will again.

I don’t have soap, so once I peel off all my ratty bandages, I scrape my skin raw with my rough palms and overgrown nails, nearly ripping out the stitches above my ear when I dunk my hair into the basin and scrub violently. By the time I’m done, I feel cleaner than I have in months, and the water still sloshing around in the basin looks more like mud than anything else.

I’ve washed the stitches on my chest, five grotesque claw marks showing proudly where my heart still lingers, and the stitches on my arm as well. Those’ll make for interesting scars, not that I needed any more. I don’t even know what to make of them. Animal bite marks on my shoulder, then jagged vertical gashes where the Devil’s teeth slashed through my skin down to where he caught grip again, another line of savage punctures just under the curve of my bicep. Then another brief set of slipped fangs, another ring of bites just below that, and down once more until just above my unnaturally intact elbow, where the final band of gnawing makes a thick, bloody circle to show where I had given up on struggling.

Sure fucking _looks_ like I got mauled by a wild animal, by the beastly, screaming incarnation of the Devil himself.

For some reason, even though it’s the first time I’ve actually seen the marks, I can’t bring myself to stare at them. They ache and twinge from being scrubbed, practically begging for my attention, but right now, they’re just another irrefutable reminder that _nothing_ about reality feels right anymore.

I’m so fucking tired.

I’m tired of this war, I’m tired of being afraid, I’m tired of knowing nothing and wanting to know even less. I’m tired of being too scared to ask questions. I’m tired of the reek of stale kerosene.

Right now, I think if Marco or Francesco or those horrible twin Goliaths came and crushed the life from my frail bird heart, I’d let them.

That is a fucking _awful_ feeling.

\--

When Marco creeps back into the ward, I’m sitting at the head of my bed, my knees tucked against my chest and my chin resting atop them, staring vacantly at the ominous-looking shackles lying undone at the foot of my bed. My hollow eyes still burn with the salt of the tears I couldn’t hold back anymore, the dark skin beneath them likely flushed angry red, rubbed raw from the calloused heels of my palms trying to destroy them before they could stream down my face. 

I’m still naked, but I don’t care. What few clothes I’d been wearing are probably better off being burned than washed at this point.

I’m so tired.

Carefully sliding forward, Marco ducks to try and catch my eye, and I make no effort to meet his gaze. He cringes at my expression, but now that I’m not ready to lunge at him, he seems bolder in his approach. 

“These ought to fit you,” he says softly, placing a carefully folded pile of nightclothes at the foot of my bed. “They’ve been in a cupboard for a few years, so they might smell like an old-timer’s dogs, but they were clean when I put them in.” He fidgets slightly, hovering by the footboard, before weakly chuckling, “Looks like you had more dirt on you than I thought, hm? Must feel nice to be clean.”

I feel like crying again.

Squeezing my eyes shut, I take a deep breath and bury my face in my knees, trying to collect myself.

He shuffles awkwardly, then takes a cautious, tentative step forward, as if testing the waters. I don’t have the energy to snarl at him, not right now, so I just keep still, and after a long moment, he comes to stand beside me. “I really am sorry, Jean,” he murmurs, before he gently rests a hand on my bare shoulder. His fingers are soft and cool, and they feel nice on my raw, burning skin. “I wish—I-I should’ve warned you. I’m sorry.”

Without lifting my head, I mumble, “What was that thing?”

Not like I really want to know the answer.

Marco sighs slowly, then lowers himself onto the edge of my bed, his palm now soothing across both shoulders, careful for my stitches. “His name is Francesco. He holds the keys. As far as I know, he always has, and always will.” He pauses, audibly considering his next words. “He... he lives in the dark,” he finishes lamely, as if I couldn’t figure that shit out myself.

Still working on breathing evenly, I try to clear my head of the exhausted fog obscuring my thoughts, but it clings stubbornly.

Out of all the awful questions I could possibly think to ask, the only one that comes to mind is, “What happens to me when you’re done fixing me?”

Marco tenses, his hand abruptly ceasing its rubbing, but after a moment he deflates again with a shaky exhale. “It’s... it’s not my place to tell you,” he mumbles, his fingers slowly sliding up the nape of my neck, into the shaggy hair at the base of my skull. He scratches lightly, which is unnervingly comforting for some reason. “It’s best not to think about it.”

“Gonna sell me to the Krauts?”

“In time, Jean,” he whispers, continuing his gentle scratching. “Answers will come in time, but for now, you’re better off not knowing.”

“Bullshit.”

He swallows heavily, dragging his nails up the back of my head and into the longer, lighter hair on top, winding his fingers gently through wet blonde strands. “I know how it sounds,” he sighs eventually, “But as far as this goes, you can trust me. It’s much better to not know.”

The sense of looming horror his words drill into me is softened somewhat by the soothing movement of his narrow fingers, by the weight of his elbow against my shoulder, by the light brush of his clothes against my skin. Marco’s so disarming, even when he’s basically sealing my doom. I don’t know what it is about him, but when he’s close by, I feel... warm. He’s not very warm, not as warm as a man should be, but it doesn’t matter. His warmth doesn’t come from his skin.

I don’t know anything. I don’t know what this place is, or what Marco is, or even what I am anymore.

Even so, with his fingers combing through my hair, I don’t feel so close to death, and that is a reprieve I’m willing to take.

\--

The clothes Marco brought are too big for me, but that’s not surprising. I’ve always been on the scrawny side. Starving and freezing in foxholes just exaggerated my already sharp edges. 

I can’t bring myself to talk much, and Marco seems to understand that without asking. Once he locks my shackles up again, he calls out something in Italian to whatever the fuck is guarding the hall, and I have to squeeze my eyes shut and fist my hands in the sheets to not vomit when it responds from inside my head. 

Thank God it trusts Marco’s word. I don’t think I could stomach another visit with the living darkness.

Marco doesn’t leave right away, for which I’m surprisingly grateful. He just goes back to messing with his matchstick record player, and I do my best to curl up into a tiny ball under my thin, dirty sheet, pulling the edge over my head for good measure.

After a long while, the tinny, clicking sounds of his tinkering slow to a stop. His thoughtful hums continue, though, until eventually I hear him set his record player on the floor and crawl over to my bedside on his knees, his movement impressively quiet. Silently, he ducks under my sheet and pops up over the side of my bed, nothing but a pair of wide, dark eyes blinking through the gloom. If I had any sense of humor left, it might be comical.

“Your wrist,” he hisses mutely, holding his palm out. I raise my eyebrows, but he just gestures insistently, his brow furrowing in concentration. For lack of anything else to do, I hold out my hand, letting him pull it just over the edge of the bed.

My chains rattle lightly on the sheets, which sets him on edge, his eyes narrowing as he freezes and listens intently. Listening for what, I have no idea. At this point, it could be fucking anything.

“The hell are you up to?” I breathe after a second, not bothering to hide my darkening frown.

“Shh, shh,” is the only terse response I get. 

Marco listens for a moment longer, then tugs my hand closer to himself, tilting his head to get a better look at the heavy iron dangling from my wrist. Humming under his breath, he runs his fingers over the hinge, then delicately slides something out from behind his ear. 

It’s metal, whatever it is, long, thin, shining dully in the dingy firelight filtering through my sheet. It takes me a second to realize that it’s the straight pin he’d been using to mess around with the record player’s motor. He’d apparently bent it to fit neatly in the curve behind his ear, one sharp end hooked slightly to rest over where his ear joins the side of his head. The curling ends of his messy hair had easily concealed it. 

My confused frown deepens, but I hold still while Marco quickly crooks the other end of it between his teeth. He shifts closer, tilting his head again, then slips the bent pin into the battered keyhole on my shackle.

I watch him dig around for a while, his tongue poking out in concentration as I gently bite my own on the thousand burning questions I so badly want to ask him right now. “Shh,” he sighs again, once again strangely in tune with my thoughts. He glances up at me through his bangs, barely meeting my eyes for half a second, then focuses again on digging around in the filthy-sounding locking mechanism.

I think he’s trying to bust me out.

I cannot for the life of me imagine why.

There’s a distinct, crunchy click that catches our attention, the two of us simultaneously freezing. He presses the pin further and wiggles it some more, earning another click, and then another, and just as a fourth one comes, he gives a shivering little sigh and pulls another, much older-looking pin from his shirt pocket.

I watch him slide the second pin into the lock, then hold my breath as he delicately, delicately turns them, and—

And then the shackle bursts open, clattering from my wrist to the stone floor with a sudden, deafening cacophony.

Marco curses urgently, flailing frantically for the shackle and slamming it back around my wrist before he whirls out from under my sheet. Every hair on my body is standing on end, animal instinct screaming at me to fight, so when Marco grabs my upper arm and hauls me upright, I snarl and whip around as best I can to face him, trying and failing to wrench myself out of his solid grip.

“Jean, you brute,” he’s saying loudly, his fearful eyes focusing intently on mine, “It’s only a little blood, surely you can spare it without all this commotion?” He twitches his eyebrows pointedly, but my heart is still pounding, my chest heaving. I try again to rip myself away from him. He’s too strong, though, his grasp too firm for me to escape, so I cower before him, meeting his eyes with a defiant glare.

A long moment passes where we just stare at each other. I’m grinding my teeth, my blood racing hot through every part of me, until eventually Marco’s gaze flicks from me to the doorway behind me and back again, his shoulders sagging almost as if in relief. 

“There’s a good lad,” he announces, releasing my arm with another, much gentler squeeze. He looks up at the doorway again, then slowly backs away from me until he can sink down onto his stool with a long, shaky sigh.

“Are you fuckin’ nuts?” I hiss, irately rubbing my bicep. At least it wasn’t the arm still full of stitches.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers back, still nervously glancing up at the doorway as he rubs the tips of his fingers over his lips. “I really am, I—”

“The _hell’s_ gotten into you?”

Marco runs his hands through his hair, chewing on his lip for a moment before he scoots his stool a few inches toward me. I recoil harshly, eyes narrowing to slits, but he raises his hands in easy surrender and leans back, swallowing heavily. After a tense beat, he stretches his foot out toward my bed, then uses his heel to drag his stool cautiously closer, still doing his best to look like he means no harm.

For right now, I’m just fine where I am on the far edge of the bed.

Seemingly emboldened by my lack of aggression, Marco pulls himself up to my bedside with his heel, then slowly, carefully reaches down to the floor.

“I’m so sorry, Jean,” he mutters as he sits up again, licking his dry lips. He hesitates before he holds his shaking hand out, palm up, showing me what he’d been reaching for: the two pins he’d used to pick the lock. They must’ve been knocked loose when the shackle hit the floor. There’s a long, thin scratch across his palm, like one of the pins had cut him as the shackle dropped, and even though it looks somewhat deep, it’s not bleeding. His hands must be rougher, more calloused than I’d realized, though they don’t look it.

I stare up at him then, tension starting to seep away from my hunched shoulders at the open, honest apology painted all across his dark face. My lingering confusion must be wildly apparent in my expression, because he shrinks slightly, curling his long fingers over the pins as he pulls his hands away again. 

“I just, um,” he whispers, finally dropping his gaze to his lap. “Those look awful uncomfortable.”

I don’t know why, but I’m suddenly incredibly irritated by his vagueness. Unreasonably so.

I’m so used to being unprepared and uninformed, used to vague bullshit explanations from everyone around me and above me. I’m a _soldier,_ for God’s sake. We all live in a constant state of not knowing anything about anything, of barely knowing what each step forward could mean for us. Even so, Marco’s seeming inability to explain himself to me breeds a shuddering, rankling ire in my chest, clouding my judgment and picking away at whatever sort of patience I’ve managed to scrounge up in the last few years.

I’m short-fused at the best of times, but this thing in my chest is something else entirely.

Whatever this is, it’s... foreign.

It doesn’t feel like me at all.

I squeeze my eyes shut and fist my hands in the sheet, forcing myself to take deep, steady breaths. Inhale and count to ten, hold, hold, hold... exhale all of it. Just like my sister used to do when she’d get angry, so angry, her bony fists clenched tight enough that her nails would dig bright red crescents into her palms. If it worked for her...

This burning feeling in my chest, it’s just frustration. I’m just tired. Just exhausted from fighting, on edge from being held captive, antsy and bedsore and just... tired. That’s all. 

I’m still me. Still here.

“Jean?”

Marco’s voice, his gentle, worried voice slips into the space between breaths, so I shake my head and look at him again, and whatever had been seething inside me dissipates entirely at the guilt and the concern in his dark, watery eyes.

I swallow roughly, my throat dry, and rub my hand down my face, all too aware of the sounds my chains make as they’re shifted and pulled. “Can you just...” I mutter, “Spare me the bullshit, alright?”

He sighs softly and nods, glancing around me toward the doorway once more. “I just wanted to see if I could do it,” he murmurs, leaning closer so I can hear him. “It’s not right, you know, men chained down like—” Marco’s voice falters, his eyes widening slightly. After a beat, he weakly finishes, “L-like dogs.”

I squint at him, and he sucks nervously on his lips, but before I can ask what the hell that’s supposed to mean, he sputters, “I-it’s just, I’ve never _liked_ it at all, see. Robbing a man of the freedom to at least stand tall on his own two feet. Even if he’s meant to be a prisoner, it’s cruel. Monstrous.” Marco pauses again, his knee bouncing restlessly, before he lowers his gaze and mumbles, “I guess I just... couldn’t take it anymore. Risky as it was, I still wanted to try.”

My gut clenches anxiously at that. 

I can’t even begin to imagine the extent of the risk he’d taken just to try and bust me out, nor the undoubtedly horrifying consequences if he got caught. Marco knows the danger a sure sight better than I do, and he’s _still_ shaking violently from how close he came to fucking it up.

It takes me a minute to try to think of something to say to him. I could thank him, or tell him not to be so blind stupid, or beg him not to risk his life for mine. Something, anything. My tired head’s stuffed with air, though, and I can’t focus long enough to find my words, let alone compose a meaningful response. 

In the end, all I can manage is a dry, crackling, “Why?” 

From here, I can see his gaze moving quickly across the floor between his boots, searching for the answer in the dirt packed between stones. He contemplates my question for a while, until finally he exhales raggedly and whispers, “I need to believe it’s possible for men like you to escape this horrible place.” His eyes slide closed before he bows his head further and leans his elbows heavily on his knees, the unseen burden on his tired shoulders somehow rendering him ages older than his defeated expression. 

After a long moment, he whispers again, his wavering voice barely more than a hint of tearful breath shaking from his lips.

“I need to believe I can try to make up for the things I’ve done.”

I don’t know much of anything about Marco. 

I don’t know anything about what he’s done, or what he thinks he’s done. I don’t know why he thinks the only way he can atone is by helping me escape. I know nothing about the weight he carries in his soul. 

What I do know is that his guilt is consuming him.

As Marco’s hunched shoulders begin to shake with his choked breath, he buries his face in his hands, trying to stop up the tears already dripping in dark spots on the ancient stone floor.

The devout Christian in me wants to pray for him, for his bruised, battered soul. The soldier in me wants to shoulder his weight, to help carry him out of the line of fire. 

The terrible, hateful, angry thing in me thinks that whatever he’s done, he’s done to me too, and I have no idea yet what that might mean.

The man in me knows that whatever it means, it’s tearing him apart.

Every soldier knows guilt. We’re all drowning in it, crushed beneath it. We’ve all seen and done horrible, unspeakable things, things that we’ll never be able to tell anyone back home. Not our parents, not our wives, not our children. Not when we’re supposed to be brave soldiers, defending our country against the evil that threatens to swallow it whole. Heroes with paper smiles and screaming nightmares.

We are all haunted.

I move without thinking about it, shuffling across the bed toward him and reaching out to rest my hand on the nape of his neck. He startles at my touch, his breath catching in his chest, but he doesn’t look up at me. I do my best to sit upright, using what slack I can coax out of my chains to at least turn to him before I reach over and drag him up against my sore chest.

Marco tenses further, freezing in place as I sling my arms around his shoulders. He must not be used to physical contact, or maybe he’s just alarmed by how readily I’m offering it to him. 

I can’t imagine what would’ve become of me without Reynolds to hold me tight every time one of our friends died in front of us. I never talked about the nights spent sharing foxholes, wrapped around each other until the shaking stopped. I never listened when he tried to talk about them, either. Nor when he tried to talk about any of the other things we did in the dark, dug into the frozen ground or hidden beneath stolen sheets or anywhere else he thought we could get away with it.

Maybe I should’ve listened to him more. Even if he did talk too damn much. 

My point is, the only reason I’m still standing is because I had someone to cling to, someone to shield my face while I cried and cried and cried. 

Far as I can tell, Marco has no one.

I rest my chin atop his head and hold him tighter, gathering his loose shirt between my fingers. He sniffs once or twice, his stiffness splintering into tremors, until all at once he lets himself shake apart in my arms.

His hands grip my narrow sides, ever mindful of all my broken pieces as he holds onto me and sobs into my shirt, gasping tortured apologies between shuddering, choking breaths. He leans closer, and I let him wrap his trembling arms around my hips, shifting to bury my face in his mussed hair with a ragged sigh.

I wonder how long it’s been since someone let him cry like this. If he used to share someone’s foxhole like I did, or if he held onto some town girl somewhere and tearfully begged her not to tell anyone. If he has a girl back home in Manhattan that sees through the masks men wear, if she sees the vulnerable little animals we all are. If he scatters his tears along the dirt streets of New York in secret before he paves over them with gold.

I close my eyes, lightly trailing my fingers through the soft hair curling over the nape of his neck, and wait.


	4. Betrayal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Marco told me not to trust him, I didn't believe him. Not really.
> 
> Now, I don't have any choice but to believe him.
> 
> **I.**
> 
> _March 1944. Allied forces fight their way north through German-occupied Italy toward Rome, hoping to wrest control of the peninsula from Hitler in what would become the costliest Western campaign in the course of the Second World War._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> huge thanks to [wingsofbadass](http://archiveofourown.org/users/wingsofbadass) for german help!! she has saved me from a life of shamefully google translating, what a blessing

_‘Little one...’_

I am not awake.

There’s the low, raspy whisper of a voice slipping up from the bottom of my mind. It’s... familiar, but I can’t place it.

_‘Little one, you mustn’t come here anymore.’_

I’m not even sure where _here_ is, but my lips move anyway, my tiny child voice cracking around stale breath. “You were singing,” I object. 

God, I’m so _tired._ There is cold, packed earth beneath my feet, and the air is still and cool, and I’m standing up somehow, despite being too tired to even open my eyes. The voice repeats its plea, soft and sad and disembodied in the darkness behind my eyelids.

“But _why_?” I sigh petulantly, my heavy head nodding back. I’m starting to weave in place, so exhausted that even just existing is too hard right now. Without thinking about it, and without commanding the words, I whisper, “I know you’re lonely, all by yourself down here.”

_‘Jean...’_

Somewhere far above me, frantic, shuffling footsteps. My mother must be searching for me now.

_‘You’re scaring them.’_

I take a slow, rattling breath, swaying harder, and then everything is grey and still.

\--

I can barely sleep anymore.

Out on the lines, nothing is ever truly silent. Silence heralds the coming of bombs, so when things get quiet, I get nervous. 

Down here, though, _everything_ is silent, and with nothing but the crackling gasps of the torches to listen to, my ears are starting to ring almost constantly.

When there _is_ movement, I hear it like a gunshot. The slightest sound jolts me out of restless slumber and into a panic. A mouse chewing somewhere in the ward, Francesco creeping up and down the hallway, shuffling footsteps that only occasionally belong to Marco. Doors opening and closing, creaking hinges, distant, muffled voices... everything is too much with no other sounds to balance them out. It hurts my ears, all of it.

I don’t know how long I sleep now, but it never feels like more than a few minutes at a time. My skin crawls, cold sweat pours down my body, and no matter what I do, there’s no getting rid of the overwhelming unease curling and fluttering in my guts. 

I can’t take this place much longer.

The only sound that doesn’t leave me startling out of my skin is that of Marco singing, although his first few notes on the piano are always just about heart-stopping. 

Right now, he’s playing something different, for once. Something sweet, but not so sad. He must be in a good mood.

Just as he starts singing, his smooth voice curling around some foreign tongue like he’s spoken it for years and years, he misses something on the piano and pulls a truly atrocious noise out of it. There’s a pause, quiet crawling back into my ears and ringing just loud enough to be maddening, before I hear Marco’s voice again.

He calls for Francesco, louder than I think I’ve ever heard him speak before. As usual, I have no idea what he says next, but his tone is nearly cajoling, lilting Italian singing through the halls like he owns the damn place.

Then I hear the flutter of claws, quiet and sinister as Francesco scuttles down the hall toward Marco’s voice.

Once again, ice creeps up between my shoulder blades as Francesco responds to Marco’s call. Crushing my palms over my ears does nothing to muffle that voice.

_“Marco, non cosi forte. Il Re—”_

“Francesco!” Marco’s voice takes on an almost playful, pleading warble. How can he possibly be so cute with that... _whatever_ that thing is? How has this place not broken him yet?

There’s a low exhale, or something like it, seeing as it doesn’t come from any lungs of this earth. It sighs like Marco does when he’s slightly exasperated, before I hear the claws scuttle further down the hall, toward where Marco’s voice is coming from. The hallway doesn’t look any less dark, though, and no matter how hard I squint out into the pitch, I can’t catch any hint of movement aside from that awful, unholy sound.

Marco starts playing again, the same notes he’d opened his song with, and I guess it’s supposed to be a duet or something, because his voice isn’t the only one I hear now.

The voice belonging to the beast that holds the keys whispers up from the deepest parts of my chest, floods like grey smoke through my ribs, and as its raspy cadence swirls and spreads within me, the room around me starts spinning.

I’m so dizzy, so tired, and as the room goes dark and the torchlight smears across my fading vision, I feel... calm.

\--

Once, in a desperate attempt to stop my sleepwalking, my father tied me to my bed. I was six years old. It was one of the last times I ever saw him.

It didn’t work.

I wrenched out of my bonds in my trance-like sleep, badly spraining my shoulder in the process, and despite all the locks along the top edge of the cellar door, I found my way into the dark once more. 

I was never afraid until I woke up. Confused, cold, standing alone in the dark with the stink of ash and smoke, I would cry and cry until my parents came to find me.

Whenever my sister found me first, she would stand on the other side of the closed door and knock, her bony knuckles almost deafening against the dense wood.

She would stand there, her thin ankles casting shadows in the pale hallway light, and wonder aloud if maybe I belonged down there, stored out of sight with the rest of the things that were burned in the fire.

\--

“Jean! _Jean!”_

Someone’s shaking me.

There are strong hands wrapped around my shoulders, rattling me back and forth. When I open my tired eyes, there is light enough to see Marco’s wide, panicked stare inches from my own, and _God in heaven my hands hurt._

I suck in a sharp breath through my teeth and fold my wet, aching hands against my stomach, and just before Marco starts shoving me backward, I realize that I have no idea where I am.

We’re standing in a long stone hallway, barely lit with burned-down torches, but that’s all I can gather before Marco’s steering me through the high stone archway and back into the ward. The moment we cross the threshold, I hear a faint flurry of claws on stone, and then all light in the hallway vanishes as if it had never existed at all.

I... left?

“How did you do this, Jean, _God,_ ” Marco’s stammering, but I’m still too confused to understand much of anything. My head hurts so fucking badly, and my wrists are throbbing and sticking to my shirt. “If they’d caught you—oh, they would’ve killed you,” he continues, his voice quaking with anxiety, “And it would’ve been daylight for me, no doubt—”

“M-Marco—” I wheeze, trying to focus my swimming vision on his unusually pale face. He’s sweating, his frantic eyes wide and sunken, paranoia written all across his features. I trip backward and land on my bed, and Marco hauls my legs up onto the thin mattress as quick and easy as breathing.

“And your _hands, God,_ how did you—”

My hands are in _agony._ I look down at where he’s holding my forearm in one shaking hand, and it takes me a second to come to terms with the fact that my wrists and my hands are flayed open, blood smeared and clotted in black patches, skinned and scratched like I’d—

Like I’d slipped my shackles. Violently.

One of my thumbs is clearly dislocated or broken, my pulse pounding in the twisted joint. My feet aren’t doing so well, either, but there’s significantly more blood splattered on the sheets around the empty shackles piled near my wrists.

It _hurts._

I dig my teeth into my cracked lip and try to breathe, try to think, try not to just fucking cry like a child, but God, I can’t take this fucking place anymore. I am losing my mind.

I curl onto my side toward Marco, tucking myself into a tiny ball, and some part of me wants to apologize to him, but I don’t know what for. Instinct, muscle memory from so many years of apologizing, of guilt and shame and fear born of awakening in the long-sealed dark.

“Jean,” he whispers after a moment, his other hand gently, so gently coming to rest on the side of my aching head. My breath hitches audibly, just as his shivers out in a jittery sigh, before he breathes, “Don’t move. I’ll get you medicine for those.”

I don’t want him to leave. I don’t want to be alone again.

When he lets me go, though, he doesn’t move far, just around to his desk. I watch over my shoulder as he frantically rifles through his desk drawers, pulling out jars and bottles from deep corners, muttering under his breath the whole while. My eyes are burning with tears, and every part of me is shaking apart from pain and fear, but I keep watching him turn his desk inside out because at least _one_ of us is doing something.

He’s crouched down, shoulder-deep in the bottom drawer of his desk when he grimaces and calls, “Francesco!”

Oh God. I hear him skittering closer and my stomach churns, clenching tightly in revulsion. I roll away from him and focus intently on Marco.

Marco blinks up at me, worry etched all across his face, before he turns toward the doorway and starts talking to the living darkness in quick Italian. I curl in tighter on myself, folding my mangled hands back into my stomach. More blood smears across my shirt, the half-dried trails that had dripped down my knuckles coming off in dark, clotted stains, but I don’t care. 

Surprisingly, Francesco doesn’t reply to whatever Marco had said. I hear him skittering away again, down the other end of the hallway, and the relief must be clear on my face, because Marco finally leans out of his desk and gives me a brief, twitchy smile.

“I know the way he speaks is uncomfortable for you,” he whispers, his eyes flicking between me and the doorway. “I’m sorry, Jean. I should have guessed that his song would affect you. I asked him to keep it down for now.”

I just stare at him. Cold sweat slides down my forehead, dripping from my nose, my hands are congealing to my shirt, and the living, sighing, singing embodiment of pitch darkness apparently has the decency to not make my life more miserable than it already is.

God help me, I’m losing my mind.

Crouched on the stone between my bed and his desk, Marco pulls a big square sheet of heavy, yellowed paper from the pile of shit he’d pulled out of the desk and spreads it out on the floor in front of him. He reaches without looking and grabs a fat stick of charcoal from his pile, not even bothering to sharpen it before he draws a quick, messy circle maybe a foot in diameter in the middle of the paper, much larger than the one I’d seen on his desk the night I listened to him apologize to a corpse.

He tosses the charcoal aside for a thick fountain pen, hastily brushing the black dust off his fingers before he leans over the paper again. 

Pen in hand, he moves quickly and without looking at me as he starts drawing strange lines and shapes inside the circle, muttering to himself once more. He looks like an absolute madman, the surety with which he draws his unnerving sigil, the utter nonsense of its geometry. Just like the other one, looking at this strange, complex symbol fills me with unease, as if I had room for any fucking more.

Just as he leans far forward and starts scribbling tiny, slanted words around the outer edge of the circle, turning the paper with his free hand as he does, I hear Francesco coming back. Nauseous chills roll up my spine at the sounds he makes, scratching across the ceiling and the walls and God knows what else. He doesn’t come in, though, and he doesn’t speak; rather, I hear the sound of something glass being set delicately on the stone threshold, then the sound of that something rolling across the uneven floor toward us.

Marco glances up at the sound, then curses under his breath and rushes around my bed toward the sound. “ _Grazie, Francesco,_ ” I hear him breathe. He bustles back over to his paper then, carefully setting the thing down beside him. 

It looks like an incredibly old canning jar, one of the bigger ones, and the cloudy glass is filled with a black, ominous-looking slop. What lurks inside that, I don’t even want to know.

Marco finishes with the drawing quickly, then sets his pen aside and bends down over the paper, blowing insistently on the ink to coax it into drying faster. His hands are still shaking, and he’s still pale, looking almost sickly in the low, flickering firelight. He looks like he hasn’t eaten in days. Hell, even his shirts seem to be hanging loose on him. 

I open my mouth to talk, to ask him what in God’s name he’s doing, or why he looks like so much shit, but he glances up at me before I can even find my voice and presses one finger to his lips. He shifts back on his heels and peers around my bed again, anxiously checking the hallway, before he looks back up at me and murmurs, “We don’t have much time. Let me do this.”

I have no idea what the hell that means, but I nod anyway, shivering at the intensity of his haunted expression.

Seemingly relieved, Marco nods his head, then turns and grabs a wide stone bowl from his pile of stuff, some kind of mortar and pestle. He takes great care to align the bottom of the bowl just right with his drawing, setting it gently on one of the smaller circles within the main one. Once it’s in place, he pulls the pestle out and drops it in his shirt pocket, then starts reaching for the bottles and jars he’d pulled from his desk.

I don’t know what any of the shit is that he puts into the bowl. A handful of something that looks like ashes, a few smooth black pebbles, something extremely squishy and unsettling that hadn’t seemed like it wanted to come out of its short, painted jar. He pulls the pestle back out, smudging charcoal and ash on his shirt as he does, and as he grinds all these things together, he mutters something in some language I can’t quite catch and slowly, evenly turns the bowl in place. He’s so focused, his shoulders tense and his brow furrowed, so I keep my mouth shut a while longer, even though the dread curling in every part of me is starting to coalesce in my chest.

_Everything_ about this feels wrong.

I swear, I can almost _smell_ it, the sense of wrongness I get from all this. It’s like all these things Marco is mixing together are releasing noxious fumes into the air, filling the room with a disquieting stench. I peel my more functional hand off my shirt, wincing at the sharp pull of congealed blood, and clench my rattling fist around my tags and my cross where they’re hidden beneath my clothes. The gesture soothes me just a little.

After a long minute, Marco sits up and exhales shakily, then squeezes his eyes shut, seeming to sway where he kneels. Maybe I’m not imagining the fumes.

“Jean,” he murmurs, wiping the back of his hand across his sweaty brow before turning to look at me. “I’m sorry, but can I see your hand?”

I furrow my brow at him. He seems to understand.

Marco swallows heavily, then pins me with a pleading expression, his teeth digging into his dry lip before he explains quietly. “I-I need some of your blood for this. It won’t—it reacts badly with your body if it doesn’t have a piece of you. Just a few drops, I swear.”

It takes me a long minute to process that. I ain’t a scientist, but that sounds like utter bullshit to me. I gape at him and try to find the words to tell him so, before finally managing, “What the fuck kind of doctor are you?” 

He drops his gaze to the floor and hunches his shoulders slightly. Fear and uncertainty are starting to become an animal in my stomach, a snake tying itself in heated knots and kicking my pulse back up to thundering. It’s that ire again, that anger I’d felt the other day, something sharp and foreign nestled in amongst the rest of me. It _seethes,_ boiling with impatience and irritation from being so fucking clueless for so fucking long.

It scares me far more than Marco does.

Taking a deep breath, Marco looks up at me again and answers my question. “A terrible one,” he says, his voice only shaking a little, “But the only one you’ve got.” He exhales anxiously, then extends his hand toward me. “Please, Jean.”

I swallow heavily. I can’t find any reason to say no to him, though, even though this is frankly _insane,_ so I peel the hand with the fucked thumb out of my sticky shirt and hold it out to him.

He licks his lips and edges closer, carefully wrapping his cold fingers around my forearm and guiding my hand out over the bowl, over the thick, ashen glop that the contents of the bowl had been ground into.

“This—it’ll sting a little,” he breathes, glancing up at me. His eyes are terribly bloodshot, I notice, but before I can do much more than register it, he’s lowering his gaze to my hand and reaching up to pick one of the wet, black scabs away from the inside of my wrist.

It stings like a _bitch,_ but I bite back the discomfort. He holds my hand over the bowl and squeezes the relatively unmarred inside of my forearm, coaxing fresh blood to the surface. As it drips from my wrist into the bowl, he watches it intently, his tongue poking out to wet his cracked lips. 

“Okay,” he mumbles after a good few drops, “That should be enough.”

“ _Good,_ ” I grunt in response, yanking my hand back with a pained hiss. “Giving me the fucking creeps.” My dislocated thumb is throbbing, but I tuck my hand back into my blood-stiff shirt anyway, making sure my displeasure is loud and clear. If he notices, though, he doesn’t give me any indication.

Instead, he’s staring at his own hand, his fingers visibly shaking. My sudden movement had smeared blood across his palm, and rather than wiping it off, Marco’s just... staring at it.

My skin crawls.

Before I can say anything about it, or about anything else, Marco squeezes his eyes shut with a wheeze and slams his palm down on his thigh, roughly scrubbing my blood off on his pants. 

He’s never seemed like he’s scared of blood before now. Shit, I don’t even know if _scared_ is the right word for the face he was making.

Nervous, sure, and definitely uncomfortable, but some tiny part of me insists that the look in his wide eyes as he stared at my blood was pure, animal _hunger._

He shakes his head hard and takes a deep breath, raking his hands through his messy hair, and then he’s all business again, albeit looking a little more rough around the edges. He leans over and grabs the big jar Francesco had brought, unscrewing the heavy lid with some difficulty. Whatever the shit is in there, it smells absolutely _foul,_ and I reel back from it and try not to gag. 

“It’s peat mud,” he explains quietly, giving me a grim, understanding expression. “Mixed with a few extra, uh, helpful herbs.” 

“It smells like a fucking Kraut shithouse,” I groan. He shrugs one shoulder and nods, and I pull the lapel of my shirt up over my nose and cringe further. The stink is too damn strong, an abrasive mix of wood smoke and rotting soil that burns to breathe. My eyes are watering. I don’t know how he’s tolerating it so easily. 

Holding the jar under his arm, Marco leans over the bowl and pours a good amount of the sludge into it, careful not to spill any. Once he’s done, he cups his other hand under the rim and sits back, catching a stray slop of mud in his palm. This, he doesn’t stare at. He just wipes it on his pants without more than an annoyed glance at it.

After thankfully sealing up the jar, Marco sets to mixing all the shit in the bowl together with his pestle, his brow furrowing in concentration once more. I watch him do it, still hiding from the eye-watering reek in my shirt. 

If not for the stabbing pain in my hands and feet, and the fact that I _know_ I’m awake, I’d swear to God that I was dreaming.

The shit in the bowl—it _moves._

I blink lingering tears out of my eyes and stare harder, cursing the insufficient, wavering light around us. Maybe it’s just the movement of the pestle. Maybe it’s just the consistency.

Marco wipes the pestle carefully on the rim of the mortar, then sets it aside, far away from himself, before he kneels up and reaches over to fish around on his desk.

It’s not the pestle.

The sludge in the bowl is still moving, slopping around in a lazy whirlpool like it’s still being stirred, even though it’s nowhere near thin enough to move like that.

Before I can think too hard about that, about whatever trick of the light is fooling my eyes into following that dark, muddy spiral, Marco turns back to me with a wide, grimy-looking paintbrush and says, “Hold your hands out, please.”

“You’re putting _that shit_ on my hands?” I ask, only slightly frantic about that unpleasant possibility. “That awful peat mud shit that stinks to high heaven, on these fresh, open wounds.”

The corner of his lips quirks up as he nods. “I _am_ the doctor, you know. This is hardly the first time I’ve done this.” He reaches into the bowl and swirls the brush around in it, liberally coating the coarse bristles with mud. He’s careful not to touch the mixture himself, I notice, which only makes me more anxious, even with what he’d explained about needing my blood. “I understand that you’re nervous, Jean,” Marco says quietly, his dark eyes trained on the bowl.

I stare hard at the side of his head. “It won’t kill me?”

“No.”

“My hands won’t rot off?”

Marco throws me a crooked smile and replies, “Not with this. If we put your shackles back on without it, though, they probably will. I’m almost certain those things haven’t been cleaned in centuries.”

“Wonderful,” I grunt, casting them a distrustful glance. I sigh roughly, then peel my hands away from my shirt, wincing yet again at the sharp, stabbing pain that shoots through them. When I hold my hands out to him, Marco thanks me softly and honestly, then gets right to work. 

Like he said, it’s obvious that he’s done this before. He paints the mud on my mangled hands so delicately that I barely even feel the brush, and with frankly impressive efficiency. Steadying my undamaged fingers with his gentle hands, he covers wide, gory abrasions with a thick layer of awful-smelling mud, paying close attention to make sure he covers all the wounds on both hands. He paints the entirety of my fucked thumb, too, moving especially slowly as he slides the brush along the join of my thumb and my palm. The mud doesn’t sting, surprisingly; it’s warm and it feels disgusting, but it doesn’t hurt. If anything, it soothes the throbbing, stabbing, aching pain, which I’m more than a little grateful for.

Once he’s finished muddying my hands, he turns and plucks a wide roll of bandages from his pile of shit on the floor. They look more like torn sheets than bandages, but that’s not exactly new. I’m pretty sure the entire United States ran out of actual bandages about a month into the war, if the atmosphere around real aid stations is anything to go by.

Marco carefully wraps my hands in the sheet bandages, black slop and all, covering halfway up my forearms all the way down between my knuckles and onto my fingers, almost like a boxer’s hand-wraps. Once he’s done that, he repeats the process on my bloody, filthy feet, and I don’t envy him for it.

“How long do I gotta keep this shit on?” I mumble, staring blankly at my bandaged palms. “Do we gotta put more on every time you change my bandages? Because honestly, that sounds like hell, buddy.”

“It won’t be for long,” he replies cryptically, expertly avoiding my pointed stare as he carefully wipes the brush off on the edge of the mortar, doing his best to clean the mud off the bristles. When it’s as clean as it’s getting, he sets the brush down by the pestle, then glances at his own hands and arms, checking and double-checking to make sure he doesn’t have any on his skin.

He stands slowly, popping kinks out of his back as he glances at the archway again, as if making sure the coast is still clear. Smooth as can be, he taps the toe of his shoe against the floor twice, then once more. After a long moment, three soft taps come from the hallway in return. Francesco’s claws. Chills rush across my skin.

Marco ducks quickly and unscrews the peat mud jar again, but before I can complain about it, he reaches right down into the mud and fishes around in it, ignoring my disgusted expression. His lip caught between his teeth, he digs around for a moment longer, then exhales sharply when he finds whatever the hell it is he’s looking for.

It takes me a second to realize what it is after he pulls it out, what with the mud caked onto it.

A key.

Marco turns and rips the ratty sheet off the bed across from me, quickly wiping his arm and the key off with it before turning back to me with a deeply apologetic look.

I groan, but comply with his unspoken request, and before I have time to question _why_ I’m letting him do it, he has me locked back in my shackles like I’d never slipped them at all. He even uses the muddied sheet to wipe off the bloody, clotted pieces I’d left on them.

My stomach turns.

How could I have done this in my _sleep?_

Marco quickly submerges the key back into the peat mud and seals the jar, then runs over to the archway and hands it to the darkness with a brief, grateful murmur. He lingers by the archway, busying himself with folding the dirty sheet up tight until the faint sound of a door opening and closing echoes down the hallway. Visibly relieved, Marco drops the sheet on the far bed, then comes back to kneel between my bed and his desk, theoretically to clean up the rest of the evidence.

He doesn’t move anything, though. He mostly just stares down at the bowl, his teeth digging into his lip again.

Then, with a deep breath, Marco pulls a single match out of his shirt pocket and turns back to me, his harrowed expression catching my attention instantly.

“You shouldn’t watch, Jean,” he breathes, once again starkly aged by the burden of this place, of these things he’s doing, of the ties binding him here. “Humans—n-normal men shouldn’t see things like this.”

I stare at him. He crumbles slightly beneath it, but holds my gaze, his face a mask of shame and something much darker. 

“What the hell does that make you?” I croak.

He blinks slowly, then lowers his eyes, his fingers twisting around the stem of the match as he considers that question. Taking another shuddering breath, Marco shakes his head and strikes the match, staring into the white-hot flare for a moment before he responds, his voice all but silent.

“Something much worse.”

Before his words even have a chance to sink in, Marco leans over the parchment, partially blocking my view, and drops the burning match onto a patch of scribbled stars within the thick charcoal circle.

The fire leaps and flickers, throwing showers of bright sparks into the air with a loud, crackling hiss, and once the flame has engulfed all of the little stars, something changes, and suddenly I understand why he wanted me to look away.

I have to be losing my mind.

The tall, crackling fire burning through the paper is _black._

It was white and orange, and then all of a sudden it flared out and sputtered and now it is a dancing, twisting flame that gives off _no light._ In fact, it seems to be devouring the light from around us, because the torches all snap and hiss and shrink within themselves, tall flames cowering away from the sinisterly reaching presence of the non-fire. It’s like the afterimage of a real fire, the deep, overpowering pitch that lives behind your eyelids as a shuddering outline of the light your eyes desperately miss.

My mouth hangs open as I stare at it, and Marco glances up morosely as he sits back, his hands loose in his lap. 

The mud left in the bowl is _still moving._

The non-fire spreads to the charcoal line, where it recoils with a sputter as if it had touched water before spreading around everywhere else it can reach inside, concentrated darkness flickering around the sides of the bowl and wreathing it in shadow. It’s so dark it hurts to look at, so I stare up at Marco, ready to demand answers.

It’s hard to yell at him when he’s stubbornly scrubbing tears off his cheeks, when he can’t even bring himself to look at me anymore.

I swallow heavily and look back down at the non-fire, at the ashen mess it’s making of Marco’s intricate linework, and as the parchment burns away in tiny, floating embers, the invisible hand swirling the mud starts moving faster and faster.

Peat slops up the sides of the mortar, uncontrolled now and almost violent, until a tilted wave of mud crests the edge of the bowl and meets the licking, searching non-flames.

All at once, everything stops.

The non-fire stops flickering, the sludge stops swirling, I stop breathing.

Slowly, impossibly, the stilled mud rises from the mortar.

It rises in perfect spheres, almost like bubbles, balls of mud in different sizes each floating straight up between the unmoving embers as if carried on the rising heat of the inanimate non-fire. My wide eyes burn from the stench, from the pain of staring into the darkness, and my breath is still caught in my chest, shocked motionless by the sheer impossibility of what’s happening in front of me.

I stopped believing in magic when I was little. I had to. 

My father crushed any spark of belief I had in it right out of my tiny chest. 

_All the things stupid people believe to be magic are but science,_ he’d tell me whenever he grew tired of my tall tales. _The world of men has no miracles. Leave these ridiculous stories and focus your mind on what lies before you,_ he’d insist, looming tall over me while I cowered in his shadow. _Already you become stupid, so comfortable in all your talk of magic and faeries. Why do you insist upon seeing the world as you wish it to be, and not as it is?_

In his vile mother tongue, my father burned all my childish wonder to ash.

_Und das ist es, wozu mein einziger Sohn es bringen wird?_

Every time he and I fought, my mother would hold me while I cried. When he finally vanished, I gladly filled the charred hole he left in my spirit with God’s love, and even when his sinner’s death brought ruin to my innocent family, that love comforted me. It comforts me still through every artillery raid, every skirmish, every trauma the war has hefted upon my shoulders, even until now.

Now, chained in this crypt buried deep beneath the frozen Italian earth, Marco is breathing life into an unknown magic bred of pure, fathomless darkness, and I am _terrified._

The spheres continue to rise through the air, shining smoothly in the low light, and all I can do is gawk at them.

Until the mud under my bandages starts moving, too.

My jaw snaps shut as I bolt upright and stare at my hands, at where the mud covering my flayed wrists is _bubbling_ beneath the thin wrappings. I can feel it moving across my wounds, sinking into them and spreading within them, and before I can think twice about it, I try to crush the heel of one hand against a large, swelling bulge on the back of the other.

Pain _explodes_ through my hands. I grit my teeth and choke on a sharp gasp, my broken teeth aching horribly at the pressure from my clenching jaw. It hurts, it _hurts,_ and once the shocks of stabbing pain fizzle out at my fingertips, the mud starts moving again.

It’s _hot,_ and it’s only painful when I touch it but I can’t even bring myself to care, because it’s _on me_ and God, it’s _moving,_ and Marco still can’t look at me, even when I bark his name in a frightened, accusatory shout. He hides his face from me and shakes, tears slipping from his jaw to his lap.

I scratch my nails at the bindings, trying to ignoring the bolts of pain that sizzle through my hands, up my arms, making my stomach turn and my vision blur. The mud around my fucked thumb is _pulsing,_ twining itself around and around and around my thumb beneath the bandages, until it throbs, and then hardens, and then my thumb yanks itself back into the joint with a loud, sickening _snap,_ and all I can do is choke out a low, agonized growl as the world spins out from under me.

I flop back onto the bed and clutch my hands to my stomach, arching and writhing and _God,_ this is _so wrong,_ everything about this is wrong and I want to go home I want to leave this place I can’t _take_ this anymore—

Clawing at the bandages does nothing with how badly my hands are quaking, nor does scrabbling my bound heels against the sheets. I can feel the mud moving around my feet, too, spreading and moving and living on Marco’s orders, by Marco’s magic. I wrench my eyes open and search for him in the flickering dark, panting for air as he calmly organizes his jars and bottles where he found them in his drawers. The mud is still bubbling in the air, tiny blackened planets orbiting each other amongst the frozen ember stars, suspended by nothing and kept in motion by nothing.

Before I can catch the breath to scream for answers, or for mercy, the mud under my bandages slows to a stop. It stops bubbling, stops moving, lying still under the wrappings once more. I stare down at them, making sure my arms haven’t just been scorched away into ash, before I look over at Marco again.

He’s watching the peat orbs float amongst themselves, his eyes near hollow and his face ashen, his hands shaking in his lap. He tilts his head as they slow to a halt as well, standing still in midair for just a moment before they each burst into flame.

The fires are small, more embers than flame, and they burn quickly through the mud until there’s nothing left, not ash nor smoke nor char. Nothing remains of the magic he’d created but the mud beneath my bandages.

I snarl then, scrabbling upright and back against the headboard, away from where he sits motionless, not even shocked by the culmination of his strange, heretical ritual. While he’s staring into nothingness, I scratch at my wrappings again, and this time the edge along one of my forearms comes loose, thank God. I unwrap it quickly, ready to get this mud off me, whatever vile magic he’d painted upon me—

And find nothing.

I rip the bandages off my other arm, my hands frantic, and once again find nothing.

Underneath the wrappings, there is no peat mud.

Not even a stain.

I am going mad.

My shaking hands move faster, yanking the bandages on my feet off in search of black tar, but not only do I not find any, there’s no _blood,_ either.

There’s no blood on the bandages. There’s no blood on my wrists.

There are no wounds on my skin.

Not even a bruise.

My bony white wrists look untouched beneath the bandages, and even the filthy scrape of the shackles on my pristine skin brings me no misery. My thumbs both work as God intended. Not even the faintest hint of the nauseating pain from before.

The only proof I have that I was ever wounded at all are the dark smears of blood on my shirt and on my sheets.

Just as with my twisted, mangled elbow, I am unbroken, and everything about that fact is maddeningly, dizzyingly _wrong._

Marco stands up beside me, having apparently finished clearing the evidence of his witchcraft. Not even a black mark on the stone floor where the non-flames licked across it. He stares down at me morosely, crossing his dirty, peat-smeared arms over his thin chest and curling into himself, tears rising to his tired eyes once again.

“W-what—” My voice cracks and shatters when I try to speak between gasping breaths. “W-what the f-fuck was _that?”_

He swallows audibly and shies away from me, averting his gaze. “I-if they saw those wounds on you, they would know you got out. They would—they’d kill you and me b-both.” He hunches further, as if trying to hide his shame from me. “S-so I cured them.”

I gape at him. 

He _cured_ them.

Just like he must have _cured_ my broken arm when I first came here.

Everything that I’ve been taught, everything I’ve learned in church and from the Bible has told me that all of this, whatever this is—it’s _wrong._ It’s unholy. These things Marco does, they’re dark and Godless, and he’s done them to _me._ He’s fixed several of my broken pieces, magicked away the pain and the uselessness, but what price will I have to pay for what he’s done when my time comes?

I reach out for him with a trembling hand, and since he isn’t looking at me, he can’t duck away from my grasp. I fist my hand in the side of his filthy shirt and yank him closer, close enough that I can reach up and grab his arm to hold him still, to make sure he’s real. He startles at that, his gaze darting anxiously to the dark doorway, then back to my widening eyes, every part of him tense.

“Marco,” I gasp, leaning up as close to him as I can get before the chains pull taut, “What is this place?” I jostle him easily, fear and anger crackling in my chest like arson. “What are you doing to me? What the _fuck_ are you?”

He opens his mouth as if to respond, shaking in my grip, but no words come out. He just stands there and trembles, his watery eyes flicking between mine, not even trying to pull away from my hands.

“J-Jean, I—”

I snarl again, hauling him right into my face and baring my teeth like fangs, at which he swallows heavily, his breath quick and unsteady. 

“I’m s-sorry, Jean, I can’t—”

_“LIAR!”_

He recoils harshly, glancing up at the hall again, always checking and double-checking for whatever evil hovers over his shoulder. _“Jean—”_

“ _Liar,_ ” I repeat lowly. This close, I can _smell_ his fear, even over the stink of his black magic. 

Marco looks down at me again, his lips drawing tight, and with some speed I can’t quite catch, he wrenches himself free from my grip and takes a few stumbling steps back. His face crumples slightly, tears flooding his dark eyes, his brow furrowing in shame and guilt.

“Y-you’ve been so kind to me, Jean,” he whispers shakily, “You c-came here alone, so you didn’t know. You t-treated me like—like a human. Like a _man._ It’s been so long, I-I’d forgotten what it feels like, not to be hated and feared.” He crosses his arms again and squeezes his eyes shut, tears spilling down his cheeks. I’m grinding my teeth, every part of me vibrating with the urge to lunge for his throat. “I’m such a damn _coward,_ ” he sobs. He fists his hands in his sleeves and collapses sideways onto his creaky metal stool, curling forward over his stomach, almost as if in pain. 

“I-I’m sorry, Jean, I’m s-so sorry. I’m just... I’m not r-ready for you to hate me yet.”

My breath shivers out of me in a low, raspy rumble. He doesn’t want me to hate him, and yet he makes me the victim of whatever witchcraft removed my wounds. God knows what else he’s done to me all the times I was fast asleep, drugged unconscious and floating away on morphine. Every part of me is rushing with anxious nerves.

Fisting my hands in the sheets, I lean toward him and growl, “It’s too fucking late for that.”

He stares up at me then, eyes wide and chapped lips parted, but I guess he knows he can’t argue with that. Instead, he swallows again and curls further over himself, whimpering slightly, either at my words or whatever seems to be ailing him in his gut.

“Y-you’re right,” he finally murmurs, his eyes glued to the floor. “You’re right. It’s selfish of me. I-I—I owe you this, Jean. At the very least, I owe you this.”

With a deep, rattling breath, Marco gathers what remains of his composure, then sits up and slumps back against his desk, and the look he pins me with is so full of despair and regret that I almost lower my guard.

Almost.

The acrid proof of his inhumanity still lingers in the stagnant mausoleum air between us.

“This place,” he sighs, fixing his gaze over my shoulder, “It _is_ an aid station, but not for an army belonging to any one country. You came here to recover, but also to be secured until the time is right. In a few days, the people who brought you here will take you again, and you’ll be... trained. Conditioned. Magicked into complete, blind obedience.” 

I can feel the blood draining from my face. 

He exhales slowly, his hands fisted loosely in his shirt, arms still crossed over his stomach. His lips twist in disgust as he considers his next words. “Once you can be controlled, you will become part of an army of specialized mercenaries. _Un condottiere,_ the sole property of the King to be discreetly sold to the highest bidder in any conflict.”

My hands curl back into fists in the sheets beneath me, just to keep me steady. “W-what _king?”_

Marco actually _sneers_ at that, clicking his teeth and casting a filthy look up at the doorway. “It isn’t a title he _earned._ He claimed it for himself the first time he sold a bewitched man into slavery. A bastard king of nothing but stolen lives.” He leans over and spits right on the floor, as if even speaking of the man fills his mouth with poison. 

Some part of me, some tiny, traitorous part whispers that if Marco hates this king so much, maybe he’s a slave here too. Maybe he’s just as fucked as I am.

I squash it down. My arms and legs are in chains, while Marco passes freely through these black halls.

I clear my throat and frown at him, darkly enough that he recoils again, his own disdain fading into the shame from before. “What do you mean, ‘ _in a few days_?’ ‘Until the time is right?’ How long have I been here?”

Marco sighs raggedly and closes his eyes, leaning his head forward slightly. “In two more days, you will have been here for nearly a month,” he breathes. “They will come for you then.”

I squint at him, fists tightening in the sheets and twisting anxiously. “What’s in two days?”

For a moment, he doesn’t respond. He chews on his dry lip and clutches his shirt, before glancing up at me and answering my question.

“In two days, the full moon rises again.”

I just stare at him.

In my mind, the screaming memory of the last thing I saw on the river plains far below Monte Cassino, that unholy blood moon spanning the sky, devouring the stars.

“In two days,” he says slowly, “You will change.”

I sputter slightly, trying desperately to summon up some kind of disbelief. Trying to shake the dread settling over me like a funeral shroud. “T-the fuck does that mean?”

Marco’s face pinches in sorrow again, his eyes squeezing shut. 

“You’re not human anymore, Jean.”

That unfamiliar rage again. Rankling and boiling inside me, heat spreading through my body and tensing all my muscles and standing my hair on end.

“What the _fuck_ did you do to me?” My voice is shaking with that foreign anger. My body is screaming for me to _move,_ to run, to hit something, to bite something, to _hurt_ something, but I shove it down and try to swallow the hollow ringing in my ears. “Marco, _what did you do to me?!”_

“I didn’t—that wasn’t me,” he insists, leaning pleadingly toward me. “It was already done when you were brought to me, I _swear_ it.”

“ _Bullshit_!” I turn toward him as best I can in my chains, yanking against them just to feel the way the bed jolts, just for the violence of the movement. “You’re a fucking _liar,_ God knows what other kind of devil lives within you. What did you _do?”_

He frowns at me and leans away again, his arms tightening over his stomach. “Something awful lives inside me, yes,” he huffs, averting his eyes, his jaw clenched tight. “But that has nothing to do with you, and you’re lucky for it. I didn’t change you, Jean. I just fixed the mess that was made of you.”

The question bursts from my lips before I can even think about it. “Including my arm?”

“Yes,” he replies simply. “Including your broken arm. It was brutish, the way it was... yes. I healed it, too.” He shifts uncomfortably, glancing between me and the hall. “I didn’t inflict the change upon you, though. The creature that bit you that night, she— _it_ infected you. Your blood, your bones, all of you.”

I can’t help but remember the beast. The Devil that stalked the ravaged earth and fed upon my men, my _friends._ Claws and fangs and stolen grace, its radiant silver mane in the smoky moonlight as it pierced Thomas’s body and devoured his shattered spirit right out of his desecrated chest.

That... infected me.

“Undo it,” I gasp, my breath coming quick and unsteady, my head buzzing with fear and denial and meaningless sound. The snap of bone, truncated screams for mercy, the trickle of thickening blood along cracked rock. _“Undo it.”_

“J-Jean—”

“ _Undo it_!” I scream over him, staring wide-eyed at him as I try not to choke on my own breath. _The Devil infected me._

“I _can’t_!” He stares out toward the hallway, fidgeting anxiously, always being watched, always watching. “I can’t undo it, Jean. There _is_ no undoing it.” Looking back at me again, I find something dangerously close to pity in his eyes, so I grit my teeth and yank on my restraints again. He flinches, but holds my gaze, then continues, “The wolf lives inside you now. When the creature bit you and you survived the shock, the wolf was born inside you. With your first moon, and every full moon after it until your final day, it will awaken within you, starved and furious.” 

He exhales shakily. I’ve stopped breathing. 

“It will take control, and as long as you belong to the King, you will be his to use as he sees fit until the next dawn comes.”

That foreign rage pulses within me. That consuming, violent anger, that ire that feels nothing like me.

The wolf.

The thing that killed my fellow soldiers, my only friends, the towering, profane evil that stole their hearts from them and swallowed them whole.

That is what will become of me?

This king—he’ll force me to recreate those sins?

And I’ll obey blindly?

I can’t breathe.

I’m clutching the sides of my aching head, fighting against the fangs and claws that live inside me now, against the urge to _scratch bite wound kill EAT—_

There’s nothing I can do to choke down the cracked scream welling up from within me. My nails dig into my scalp and I fist my hands in my hair, stitches pulling and every part of me burning, and all I can do is scream and scream and scream because _I can never go home._

I’ll be enslaved and sold, a ghost on the battlefield, a foxhole story for scared soldiers. Even if I _could_ go home, if Marco’s right, then this _wrath_ will swell up within me with the rising moon, and then everyone I’ve ever loved could fall beneath my hands.

I can never go home.

Can God’s love save me even from this? Is my soul marred beyond redemption?

My heart is pounding and my body is shaking, vibrating with the desperate need to _run,_ but pulling at the chains does _nothing,_ so all I can do is scream and curse this place, curse Marco, curse Francesco and the Devil and the bastard King, panic flooding every part of me in tidal waves of shocks and tremors.

I hear Marco talking, pleading with me, but I’m not listening. I cover my ears and sob into my knees, unable to breathe and unable to think, unable to even see straight around my rage and grief and hopelessness.

Marco’s cold fingers find my chest, but before I can grab him, before I can threaten him, he shoves me back against the bed with some inhuman strength and puts his other hand over my eyes.

“I-I-I’m so s-sorry, J-Jean,” he sobs, barely managing words around gasping breaths. _“Sleep._ Sleep now. G-God, I’m s-so sorry.”

My hands are too heavy to move, or I’d grab his wrist. My mouth won’t form words, or I’d ask him how the fuck I’m supposed to sleep, or maybe curse him some more. My body is sinking into the sheets, the world spinning and heaving beneath me, and when his icy hands slip away again, everything is dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have a [tumblr](http://avoidingavoidance.tumblr.com) and a serious case of cabin fever but i s2g we're gonna be free of this assbag dungeon VERY soon


End file.
